Under the proposed changes to Meaningful Use for 2015 through 2017, the Summary of Care measure has been simplified to allow providers to transmit the Summary of Care electronically to a provider who does not have an EHR and still get credit for Meaningful Use.
Under the current Stage 2 rules, “The EP who transitions their patient to another setting of care or provider of care or refers their patient to another provider of care should provide summary care record for each transition of care or referral.”
- Measure 1 states that the EP must provide a summary of care via any method for at least 50% of these transitions of care or referrals;
- Measure 2 requires at least 10% of those referral summaries to be transmitted through a Certified EHR or NwHIN Exchange; and
- Measure 3 requires at least one test to a different Certified EHR.
Under the proposed rules for Meaningful Use in 2015-2017, Measure 1 and Measure 3 above are eliminated, and the requirements for transmission under Measure 2 are widened to allow any secure electronic means of transmission: “We propose to update this measure to state simply that a provider would be required to create the summary of care record using CEHRT and transmit the summary of care record electronically.”
This would allow a Meaningful User to transmit the summary of care created by their Certified EHR in any secure electronic means, such as:
- Direct messaging
- Health Information Exchanges (HIE’s)
- Secure email
Direct messaging is already integrated into many EHR’s and HIE’s, but secure email may provide a less expensive and more accessible option, allowing providers to transmit Protected Health Information securely to any email address. There are many vendors who can provide secure email services, including:
- CipherPost Pro from AppRiver
- Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption
- ZixMail, which is the market leader in healthcare, and can be purchased for less through Google (see article here), but the setup can be a bit complicated, so a reseller such as Bi101 can handle the setup of ZixMail or help with the setup of Microsoft Office 365.
Editor’s Note: Subsequent to the publication of this article, CMS has renamed the “Meaningful Use” programs and MIPS “Advancing Care Information” category to “Promoting Interoperability”.
