What meaningful use stage 3 could require

Preliminary recommendations for stage 3 of the federal electronic health record program — starting for some doctors in 2016 — would retire some measures, increase thresholds for others and add new requirements to achieve meaningful use. Key changes proposed include:

• Removing the requirement to record smoking status during at least 80% of patient visits. Instead, smoking status would be tracked by a clinical quality measure.
• Implementing 15 clinical decision support intervention requirements, up from five in stage 2 and one in stage 1.
• Requiring clinical summaries that are pertinent to office visits be sent to patients within one business day during 50% of eligible encounters. The threshold is the same, but the summary cannot be just an abstract of the record.
• Directing practices to use EHRs to query research systems for clinical trials. The new certification criteria would identify patient eligibility for relevant trials.
• Requiring the identification of education resources in five non-English languages and mandating that 80% of materials written in at least one of those languages be made available to patients.

Source: “Request for Comment Regarding the Stage 3 Definition of Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records,” HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HIT Policy Committee, Nov. 27, 2012  (www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/hitpc_stage3_rfc_final.pdf)