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Health Information Technology Update

By, Hazel Stevenson & Rodney Redstone

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Payment for Health Information Technology (HIT) went live on October 3rd, 2011, on schedule and with no issues. By 8:30AM, records for 10 hospitals were received from the NLR (National Level Repository); this begins the process of registration and attestation. A series of XML transactions go back and forth with the NLR, and the State’s HIT specialists use the new online application at each stage of the process to update the Provider information. At the end of the process, qualified and approved Providers will receive their incentive payments for participating in the program to implement certified systems based on Adopting, Implementing, or Upgrading (AIU) HIT and achieving Meaningful Use (MU) compliance as established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This is a component of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act which seeks to improve the delivery of health care in the United States through the use of Health Information Technology (HIT).

To date, over 300 Eligible Providers (EP) and Eligible Hospitals (EH) have registered for incentive payments. The state began issuing checks for these EP’s and EH’s, on November 9th. Providers and Hospitals can participate in this program for six years.

The user interface has been written using Oracle’s Application Express (APEX). There is an Oracle backend database with 40+ tables. The XML is transmitted and received using CMS’s File Exchange program and Momentum. The batch scripts are a combination Unix, PERL and Oracle stored procedures. PERL is used for parsing the XML content. APEX runs on Apache web services. The Office of Information Technology’s (OIT) Application Development and Core Technology groups worked collaboratively to create this application in the new shared environment structure designed by Core Technology.

For more information on CMS’ EHR Incentive Programs, please visit the CMS website at http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/ .