CHIME Chair-elect to Testify at House Hearing on Meaningful Use
ANN ARBOR, MI, July 20, 2017 – The chair-elect of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is scheduled to testify today in a hearing before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. Cletis Earle, chief information officer of Kaleida Health in Western New York State, will be among healthcare leaders invited to address legislators at a hearing about legislation designed to improve the Medicare program.
In written testimony, Earle noted that CHIME members have been early and prolific adopters of electronic health records (EHRs). He credited the enactment of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (HITECH) and its Meaningful Use incentive program with accelerating use of healthcare IT tools. But providers have been hamstrung in their efforts to meet increasingly stringent requirements mandated in the legislation due the timelines needed to develop the necessary new technologies and the challenges of integrating new technologies into healthcare systems. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ changing timelines have also exacerbated their problems.
“As we stand now, more than eight years after passage of HITECH, there exists an opportunity to make policy decisions apart from the arbitrary deadlines and measures of the EHR Incentive Program,” he said in the written statement. “We are at an inflection point where our gains can be used to pivot towards the long-term goal of building and supporting a national digital health ecosystem that is interoperable and which best supports patient outcomes.”
As a representative of CHIME’s nearly 2,400 CIOs and senior health IT leaders, Earle is expected to request more flexibility in the Meaningful Use program as proposed in H.R. 3120. The bill gives the Health and Human Services Secretary discretion to modify the requirements over time as deemed necessary in conjunction with the industry.
Testimony is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. EST. It will be available by webcast here. The written testimony is available here.
About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers (CIOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With nearly 2,400 CIO members and over 150 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit chimecentral.org.
Contact
Candace Stuart
Director of Communications and Public Relations, CHIME
734.665.0000
[email protected]