Fear And Loathing In Meaningful Use

'I cannot stress this enough: It is fear that drives this process – fear of audit, fear of penalty.'

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.

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...