In the past two months, there has been a lot of debate as to what the meaning of “meaningful use” is in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and the definition was discussed at the April 28-29 meeting of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics Executive Sub-Committee.

ARRA, commonly known as the stimulus bill, is providing billions in funding for electronic medical records (EMRs), but one of the tests to qualify for money is “meaningful use” of the EMR technology. Currently no clear federal definition exists to explain what qualifies. The purpose of the meeting was to conduct a hearing to help formulate the definition.

One of the speakers at the meeting was Dr. John Halamka, the CIO of Harvard Medical School, Chairman of HITSP, among other accolades.

Rather than summarize what I was able to gleam from the online broadcasts, here is Dr. Halamka's summary of the meeting taken from blog.

1. The country must rollout EHRs with baseline functionality that at a minimum includes e-prescribing, automated lab workflow, clinical summary exchange, and quality data reporting.

2. Health Information Exchanges will evolve locally based on business cases in communities. The services offered may include e-prescribing, diagnostic test results delivery, quality data warehousing, data normalization into common formats and vocabularies, and "convening services" to create data use agreements for the community.

3. Quality warehouses are needed to provide caregivers with rapid feedback and serve as population health registries. They will often be local based on the political feasibility of co-mingling data.

4. Standards will continue to evolve, but existing standards wrapped in a service oriented architecture using a common data transport approach are good enough. We should use clinical data preferentially over administrative data for quality reporting, population health analysis, and PHRs.

5. Policies in support of this technology will continue to evolve locally. Although there should some common national policies, regional variation must be allowed.

The hearing was broadcast live on the Internet, which is where I listened to it.  For more information you can read the agenda, or to listen to the archived broadcasts.