Aaron Berdofe, MHI – Health Informatics

If we’re being honest, and I know we all are because this is the internet, we all have come to terms with the fact that Meaningful Use is one big heavy sigh of frustration.  Healthcare organizations are spending significantly more dollars than what the incentive amounts to and the only silver lining is that the program seems to be slowly withering and may very well go up in a puff of smoke (Probably after marijuana is legalized nationally).  I still think the idea of Meaningful Use was a good one, but the government decided to focus on the mechanisms a little too much instead of the output of data they wanted.  If anyone thought they were going to come out ahead on the Meaningful Use deal, then clearly they missed my very first post on this blog.

However, this probably isn’t exactly news to you, dear reader, now is it?  More to the point of my alliterative title, Meditech keeps turning the ratchet on the difficulty level of using their product to achieve Meaningful Use which isn’t helping.  In Stage 2, they told their customers to completely forget about all of the reports they spent countless hours developing for Stage 1, because now they were going to do them in SQL.  People begrudgingly obliged, because the SQL option was probably how the reports should have been done in the first place.  Meditech even was so kind to create SQL scripts for each measure and CQM so customers wouldn’t have to all individually create the same thing as they did in Stage 1.  Even though it is still rather clunky, the setup for Stage 2, is far superior to Stage 1…and here’s the “but”:

When issues are found and updates are made to the Core/Menu/CQM report scripts or even the overall setup scripts themselves, Meditech doesn’t tell anyone.  They quietly put them up on their website and wait for their customers to have issues.

Proactive customers have taken to checking the webpage weekly, just in case.  When my band books a gig, I send out e-mails and notifications because I want people to know about it.  The effort it takes is minimal and I do it in a proactive manner because I don’t want to hear “Arghh! Why didn’t you tell me about it?!?!?” from someone in the [very] small group of dedicated fans that I have.

Fortunately, Meditech put an “E-mail subscribe” option onto their Best Practices page (It’s the small e-mail icon in the top right that you definitely will miss) that will send you an e-mail if there is a “significant” update to the page.  I’m still not sure what can be considered a significant update, but I’ll let you know if I ever get an e-mail… I may have mentioned this before, but a former CIO client of mine once stated: “I think Meditech will help us meet the letter of the law of Meaningful Use, but they won’t help us meet the spirit of the program.”