Health it regional extension center program: Health care transformation through meaningful use coaching

Background. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Regional Extension Center (REC) program supports providers operating in small, rural and underserved practices to achieve meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. This includes providers who may not be eligible for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) EHR Incentive Program. The REC program is achieved through a 4-year cooperative agreement between 60 non-for-profits organizations and ONC. Objective. The purpose is to assess the RECs progress in reaching its goal of coaching over 100,000 providers in achieving meaningful use by 2014. Methods. Primary data were collected using the ONC customer relationship management (CRM) tool. These data were merged with other practice-and provider-level datasets from other federal agencies, including the CMS HER Incentive Program Data, and regional statistics. Results. Findings from the CRM reveal that RECs have already recruited over 31,000 medical practices and 140,000 providers, equating to 44% of the nation's primary care providers and over 40,000 have already achieved meaningful use. Providers working with RECs are 2.3 times more likely to get paid for meaningful use through CMS' EHR incentive program. To date, providers practicing in internal medicine and family practice are demonstrating meaningful use at higher proportions than their specialty counterparts. Furthermore, providers across all practice types identified the following 5 meaningful use measures as most challenging: clinical summaries, security review, smoking status, medication reconciliation and summary care record. The RECs have coached providers to meaningful use by providing hands-on support in the areas of IT systems, clinical workflows, and quality measurement and reporting. Conclusions. Only half way through the program, RECs have already established themselves as powerful change agents for primary care providers and will continue to help them face challenges to achieve meaningful use and support their health care transformation goals.