When it comes to the topic of meaningful use, Colin Banas, MD, is driven by fear. And he's far from being the only one.

 

The chief medical information officer at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center's concern is the potential to fail meaningful use requirements because VCU sometimes tailors a vendor's certified product in order to make it more usable.

 

Whereas such customization is a common practice in the world of enterprise software, in the realm of electronic health records it has become the veritable equivalent of stepping into a rather cloudy area wherein it is very hard to discern whether they’ve gone so far that an auditor might say VCU did not achieve meaningful use.

 

[See also: Stage 2 off to a slow start.]

 

What's more, Banas said that it would be impossible to estimate the resources VCU has used to readjust clinical workflows and codes to follow the letter of the law, when it was already clearly following the intent of the measure.

 

"I cannot stress this enough: It is fear that drives this process – fear of audit, fear of penalty," Banas said, "and fear of vendor abandonment should a client choose to forge a different path."

 

VCU is by no means alone. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is also feeling the pain. 

 

The hospital has spent a lot of time and energy trying to determine if its EHR will be safe in instances where they have changed things slightly from "what's written" into the certified product, according to Virginia Lorenzi, associate manager of information services.

 

Lorenzi, a health IT veteran with nearly 25 years of experience, said worries about a bad meaningful use audit drive many of her decisions. If an area is gray, she wants to land on the safe side, she said at the hearing, making it clear her opinions are her own and not those of her employer.

 

[See also: EHR vendors lag in Stage 2 upgrades.]

 

Certifying bodies

 

Certifiers themselves said gray areas are difficult, and heretofore ONC has not helped to unify the way the various certification bodies interpret measures.

 

Amit Trivedi, program manager of healthcare at ICSA Labs, a certification body, said ONC should conduct pilot certification tests involving all the bodies, to observe testing, understand the expected results, learn how test tools operate, and then provide feedback. "To date, this has never been done prior to publication of the certification test procedures," he said.