Image Management and Meaningful Use: What Rural Hospitals Must Know.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) has someimportant provisions that rural hospitals need to be aware of. The act establishes a funding base for healthcare facilities to establish health information technology efforts, including technology related to electronic health records. But the act also penalizes facilities that have failed to achieve various standards by 2015.

HITECH was part of the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It authorizes the United States Department of Health and Human Services to spend nearly $26 billion for healthcare facilities to adopt health information technology. Another $36 billion will be spent on a national network related to electronic health records, which includes image management systems that rural facilities use to share their images and other data with area hospitals and urban medical facilities where specialists review the data.

Meaningful use stage one in HITECH stipulates that facilities must have a certified electronic health record system and show that it is in use per the requirements. There are 25 objectives and measures in stage one for eligible providers and 25 objectives and measures for hospitals. The core requirements include recording demographics, reporting ambulatory quality measures, providing patients electronic copies of their data upon the request of the patient and protecting the electronic health information through the proper privacy and security practices.

Last August, the federal government laid out the rules for stage two, which become effective in 2014. There are 20 rules for physicians to follow. Stage two covers advance clinical processes, which would include some image management issues. Stage two calls for more rigorous health information exchange, or HIE. There will also be more strict requirements for e-prescriptions and lab results. There will be more patient-controlled data available. Stage two also calls for electronic transmission of patient summaries across multiple settings.

As it looks now, state three of HITECH will involve more meaningful use criteria to focus on patient access to self-management tools, access to comprehensive patient data through an HIE system that is centered around patients and improving the overall health of the population. These changes will be rolled out in 2016.

Critical care facilities and small rural hospitals have already witnessed the advantages they gain through electronic health records. They no longer need to take up valuable space in their facilities to store film images and medical records. Sharing these images is also much easier than it was to share images and data with specialists and other departments. But simply adopting these new technologies isn’t enough; there needs to be a thorough understanding of the changes regarding how these technologies are to be used.

The professionals at OffSite Image Management, Inc., make it their business to stay informed on the changes in the industry and the intricacies of state and federal laws, like the many regulations in HITECH. OffSite applies this knowledge in its vendor neutral archiving system, its off site data storage and business continuity solution and its PACS, HIE and virtual CD cloud management solution that are of great value to rural hospitals and imaging facilities.