To all those healthcare CIOs out there worried about ICD-10, meaningful use, accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes and a host of other government-backed efforts to reform healthcare, Farzad Mostashari, MD, has some words of advice: Don’t stay on the sidelines.

In other words, the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Coordinator for Health Information Tehnology says, “it’s never going to be an easier time than now” to adopt an electronic health record, meet meaningful use guidelines and move toward an ACO.

Mostashari offered those words of advice during a session Monday at the Medical Group Management Association’s 2011 conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center. While offering brief answers to more pointed questions from MGMA members and several media, his mood was optimistic.

“There’s not a big, bad wolf at the door,” he said.

Mostashari pointed out that the EHR has evolved significantly since its inception about 25 years ago, from “just little notes to remind us of the patient we’re seeing” to a tool for care coordination. He expects to see the rate of adoption among physician practices to top 40 percent this year and 50 percent next year.

Adopting EHRs, he said, will enable physician practices to develop the “information foundation” to coordinated care and demonstrate meaningful use.

“There’s this – frankly – largely unproductive anxiety out there right now,” he said. That anxiety is doing more harm than good in that it’s compelling physician practices to delay implementing IT, he said.

Mostashari fielded a number of questions about the size and volume of quality reports needed for such programs as meaningful use, ICD-10 and ACOs. He pointed out that meaningful use guidelines are “a pretty good checklist” for moving toward an ACO.

“If there’s a big overlap between those two, then we did our job right,” he said.

He also pointed out that harmonizing the many different quality reports “is a good idea and makes a lot of sense,” but each one has its own legislative requirement and history that can’t be altered. Trying to combine them, he said, would change processes, create more work and lead to still more quality reports to cover the areas where any harmonization didn’t overlap.

In response to one questioner who expressed the desire to see ICD-10 go the way of the metric system, Mostashari said any further delays would be unproductive.

“Is three years from now going to be a better time?” he asked.

Mostashari also announced on Monday that Judy Murphy is the new deputy national coordinator for programs and policy. Murphy comes from Aurora Health Care, where she served as vice president of EHR applications. Murphy has also been a member of the board of directors at American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Murphy’s new role as deputy national coordinator for programs and policy is the post vacated when Mostashari stepped into the national coordinator role. As such it is different than the newly-created principal deputy job that ONC announced last week.