ONC Greases the Skids for EHRs
By
John Pulley
"These initiatives are just the beginning," Kendall wrote, noting that RECs have enrolled more than 28,000 providers, including more than 1,000 per week, on average, during the last three months. He singled out the Mississippi and Maine RECs for enrolling more than 60 percent of their targeted primary care providers.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is rolling out five new initiatives that it says will help to ease the country's transition to e-records.
Feedback from the nation's 62 Regional Extension Centers was critical in developing the initiatives, said Mat Kendall, director of the Office of Provider Adoption Support, writing this week in the ONC's Health IT Buzz blog. RECs help health-care providers adopt electronic health records, or EHRs, and achieve "meaningful use."
The initiatives are:
- An interactive online community housing tools and resources for RECs to obtain strategic health IT support and exchange ideas.
- An outreach, education, and marketing guide for REC outreach efforts.
- A Meaningful Use Vanguard (MUV) cohort to showcase and reward health-care providers who are leading the switch to electronic health records.
- Outreach campaigns to help RECs recruit health-care providers.
- Partnerships with EHR vendors to identify best practices for working together to meet providers' needs.
The announcement coincided with the 2010 ONC Update Meeting this week in Washington.
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