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.

Nearly one-third of Central New York residents, 31.4 percent, have high blood pressure, according to a new report from Excellus BlueCross BlueShield.

Rochester–based Excellus, Central New York’s largest health insurer, released the report on July 11 in an attempt to inform health-care consumers about steps they can take to avoid or control high blood pressure, also known as hypertension. Consumers who do so could avoid more serious medical problems like heart disease and kidney disease in the future, according to Dr. Arthur Vercillo, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield regional president.

Lowering hypertension rates could limit health-care costs, Vercillo says. In turn, that could relieve some of the pressure driving up insurance rates for individuals and businesses.

“I can’t give you an exact dollar amount,” Vercillo says. “Don’t forget that hypertension is interrelated and hard to separate from stroke and heart attacks and dialysis, among other things. I can tell you it is huge.”

Hypertension is when systolic pressure — the “top” number measuring force against artery walls as the heart contracts — is measured at 140 mm Hg or higher. It is when diastolic blood pressure — the “bottom” number measuring force against the arteries when the heart relaxes between beats — reads 90 mm Hg or higher. 

The data in Excellus’ report also shows the importance of health-care providers inspiring healthy behaviors in their patients, Vercillo adds. The insurer hopes the report will encourage physicians to keep taking steps in their private practices to fight high blood pressure, he says.

“If there is no other message in this, it is that the patient-physician relationship is critical, and the patients need to follow their doctors’ advice,” Vercillo says. “And this is a way to reinforce that and work collaboratively with the physician community to help them get that message out there.”

For example, the Excellus report recommends participating in regular aerobic physical activity like brisk walking, dancing, or jogging to help counter hypertension. And of upstate residents who reported boosting their physical activity to try to control high blood pressure, 80.2 percent said they had received advice to do so from a health professional.

The report’s other recommendations for managing blood pressure included maintaining a healthy body weight, moderating alcohol consumption, not smoking, and using blood-pressure control medications as prescribed. It also recommended following a diet rich in potassium but low in sodium, fat, and sugar.

Blood-pressure rates in CNY

High blood-pressure prevalence in Central New York is in line with upstate New York’s average. In Central New York, 259,840 people have hypertension — 31.4 percent. The portion of residents across upstate New York with high blood pressure is also 31.4 percent, for a total of 1.2 million people.

The prevalence of hypertension is slightly lower in Excellus’ Utica/Rome/North Country region, as well as its Southern Tier region. In the Utica/Rome/North Country region, 28.6 percent of residents, or 169,780 people, are affected by hypertension. In the Southern Tier, 27.8 percent of residents, or 108,640 people, are affected.

Many Central New Yorkers are already taking some of the recommended steps to combat their hypertension, the report found. Among those diagnosed with high blood pressure, 69 percent reported reducing dietary salt, 65 percent alluded to making overall dietary changes, 71.8 percent said they increased physical activity, 38.2 percent indicated they abstained from alcohol, 47.2 percent avoided tobacco, and 82.8 percent took prescribed medications.

The Excellus report was the second in the insurer’s “TakeCharge Community Health Reports” series, which is designed to describe steps upstate New Yorkers can take to proactively manage health conditions. Excellus issued its first report in the series, which was on diabetes, in the fall of 2011.

“We want to be a resource,” Vercillo says. “And as part of that, we bring the public’s attention to things they are actually empowered to do.”

The report is based on a 2009 survey from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a random telephone survey of adults ages 18 and older. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiles and reports data from the survey annually for each state and the nation.

Excellus has 700,000 members in Central New York, according to the 2012 Book of Lists.