Council Weighs in on Use of $400 Million Allocation
WASHINGTON — A federal research council outlined its spending recommendations for $400 million in stimulus funds to be allocated by the U.S. department of Health & Human Services for patient-centered research.
The report by the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was created to help the HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius distribute the funding.
“The purpose of this research is to improve health outcomes by developing and disseminating evidence-based information to patients, clinicians and other decision-makers,” states the report.
The council’s four recommendations include:
• Share research results among doctors and patients, and make better investments in how information is disseminated
• Research should focus on the needs of priority populations, such as racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, persons with multiple chronic conditions, the elderly and children
• Research should be in specific high-impact health arenas such as medical and assistive devices, surgical procedures, behavioral interventions and prevention
• Investments should be made in data infrastructure to allow current data sources to link and answer questions, development of distributed electronic data networks and partnerships with the private sector.
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HHS Timeline Goal is to electronically capture and report information and to use it to track key clinical conditions • Use electronic physician orders Goal is to guide and support care processes and care coordination • Use evidence-based order sets Goal is to achieve and improve performance and support care processes for health system outcomes • Achieve minimal levels of |
Due to astonishing achievements in biomedical science, clinicians and patients often have a plethora of choices when making decisions about diagnosis, treatment and prevention, but it is frequently unclear which therapeutic choice works best for whom, when and what circumstance,” the report states.
The council used a “transparent, collaborative process” for making recommendations and held three public listening sessions during deliberations.
In other stimulus fund news, an advisory committee convened in June and issued preliminary recommendations to better define a clause that would reward hospitals that demonstrate “meaningful use” of certified electronic health records. The clause would provide incentives from Medicare and Medicaid to hospitals with certified EHR systems.
The HSS Health IT Policy Committee created an outline for goals for 2001, 2013 and 2015 benchmarks (see sidebar) and decided to readdress the issue in July.
“We are moving fast to achieve the president’s goal to improve the health and well-being of every American through the on-going use of health information technology,” says David Blumenthal, the HSS national coordinator for health information technology. “The work of the policy committee is a first step toward assuring that technology — the electronic health record — is used in a meaningful way to provide better patient care.”
The American Hospital Association has pushed for a clarification of the clause to end disparities and potential penalties from the Medicare system if the deadline is not met.
A draft definition of “meaningful use” requires computerized entry of all orders, clinical documentation of patient demographics, problem lists and medication lists by 2011. AHA officials recommend the deadline for those requirements be pushed back until 2015, at the earliest.
“Hospitals want to adopt EHRs, but the cost of purchasing and maintaining clinical [healthcare information technology] systems is a significant impediment,” writes Rick Pollack, executive vice president of the AHA, in a letter to Blumenthal. “The definition of meaningful use is critical because hospitals need financial assistance to expand HIT use, and want to avoid the Medicare payment penalties that begin in 2015 if they are not ‘meaningful users.’”