Health IT Education at Your Fingertips
CHITREC serves as local resource for achieving meaningful use, other goals By Satyender Goel, PhD, and Abel Kho, MD, MS
The purchase of an electronic medical record system is just the beginning of a process of adoption and successful use of an EHR—just ask any eligible provider who is trying to meet meaningful use requirements.
As health care providers attest to Stage I followed by Stage II and Stage III, they will need to create reports demonstrating their compliance with meaningful use measures in order to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs.
Enrolling Primary Care Providers
Often, vendors do not provide enough instruction on their system to allow providers to create these reports.
The ongoing need for technical training and assistance will change the way medical information is stored, distributed, and seen by both providers and patients.
The Chicago Health IT Regional Extension Center is one of 62 RECs across the nation that assists physicians and other professionals reach their IT goals.
RECs have enrolled more than 130,000 primary care providers nationwide, since 2010, assisting them in becoming meaningful users of EHRs. This figure is approximately 40% of the total number of eligible primary care providers in the U.S. and well over the target goal set by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) when the REC program first launched.
The ONC administers the REC grant-funded program, which was authorized by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.
Serving All Physicians
With an end date of early to mid-2014, RECs are expanding their programs to provide low-cost services to both out-of-network primary care providers and specialists, all of whom can benefit from the REC infrastructure and intellectual capital gained over the past three years.
Services include vendor selection assistance, practice readiness evaluation, process improvement, gap analysis, workflow redesign, software and hardware contracting assistance, and general information about technology and technical support.
RECs often act as federal agents to disseminate regulatory requirements. They can help practices with audit preparation, finding trained health IT staff, and connecting them with health information exchanges.
Assistance may be hands-on or offered through workshops, webinars, focus groups and other online activities.
To learn more, please contact the Chicago Health IT Regional Extension Center by calling 312-503-2986 or emailing info@chitrec.org. Visit www.chitrec.org for additional information.
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