SYRACUSE — Central New York’s Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) has continued its efforts to help health-care providers qualify for meaningful use after learning that New York State led the nation in meaningful-use certifications as of June. HealtheConnections RHIO Central New York has helped 225 providers across its 11-county coverage area achieve meaningful use, according […]
SYRACUSE — Central New York’s Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) has continued its efforts to help health-care providers qualify for meaningful use after learning that New York State led the nation in meaningful-use certifications as of June.
HealtheConnections RHIO Central New York has helped 225 providers across its 11-county coverage area achieve meaningful use, according to Karen Romano, the RHIO’s director of provider engagement services. Of those providers, 25 gained the designation since July 10.
Meaningful use is a term created by the 2010 federal health-care reform law. Providers who achieve meaningful use demonstrate that they utilize certified electronic health records (EHR) in ways that can be measured for quality, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website.
Providers who meet meaningful-use requirements can qualify for incentive payments under Medicare or Medicaid programs. But starting in 2015, Medicare-eligible professionals who do not demonstrate meaningful use will be subject to reductions in Medicare reimbursements.
“Essentially, the idea behind that reimbursement was to be able to incent providers to implement an electronic medical record,” Romano says. “We work with practices on that.”
Medical practices throughout New York State have been pursuing meaningful use, according to a June 28 report from the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) Regional Extension Center (REC), a not-for-profit organization aiming to improve health-information technology throughout the state.
The NYeC REC said it had certified more than 1,000 New York providers for meaningful use. It was the only REC in the nation to certify that many providers, it added.
At the time, HealtheConnections RHIO had helped 200 health-care providers in Central New York achieve meaningful use. And the overall upstate region was home to more than 75 percent of the 1,000 meaningful-use certifications, HealtheConnections RHIO said.
The upstate region may have had success with meaningful-use certification because its RHIO environment is not as complex as the one downstate, according to Romano.
“There were, up until a couple months ago, six different RHIOs down there,” she says. “Upstate, we have ours, Rochester has theirs. We know our territory, we know our population, and we’re focused.”
Providers are currently qualifying for a first stage of meaningful use. Starting in 2013, they will have to meet new requirements for a second stage. Then in 2015, third-stage requirements will be introduced.
Stage two has yet to be completely defined, but it will require providers to connect to a health-insurance exchange (HIE), among other things, Romano says. The federal government has not yet defined stage three, she says.
A HIE gives authorized medical providers the ability to access patient information and medical histories. HealtheConnections RHIO administers Central New York’s HIE.
“If a provider’s patient goes to a hospital that is sharing data with the HIE, those records can be automatically pushed to a patient’s primary-care doctor,” Romano says. “Some practices are doing referrals. So you go to your doctor, and they send you over to a specialist. Some of the electronic records have the capability of clicking in a record and sending that referral over. You just show up for your appointment, and when your encounter is closed, those results will be sent back to your doctor.”
HealtheConnections RHIO currently has more than 80 medical practices hooked up to its HIE, according to Romano. Additionally, 17 hospitals are connected to it.
Overall, the RHIO is working with more than 80 medical practices and 600 providers on achieving meaningful use, including providers that have already achieved phase one meaningful use.
HealtheConnections RHIO is headquartered in 2,500 square feet of space on the 20th floor of the State Tower Building at 109 S. Warren St. in Syracuse. It has 12 employees and a 2012 budget of about $5 million, Romano says.
A majority of its budget comes from sustainability funding provided by Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, MVP Health Care, EBS-RMSCO, and POMCO Group. Some also comes from grant money carried over from previous years.
HealtheConnections RHIO Central New York is a branch of HealtheConnections. HealtheConnections’ other arm, HealtheConnections Health Systems Agency (HSA) Central New York, is responsible for health-planning activities. The HSA branch has five employees, Romano says.
Norm Poltenson, publisher of The Central New York Business Journal, serves on the board of directors of HealtheConnections.