In Part 1, we explained the conceptual changes between Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Meaningful Use Stage 2, as well as the new MU Stage 2 Menu Set Objectives. If you missed it, read Allscripts TouchWorks 11.4.1 MU Stage 2 Measures for more information.

Part 2 of this series covers the MU Stage 2 measures for Clinical Summaries & Patient Education

Clinical Summaries

Objective: Provide clinical summaries for patients for each office visit.

Measure: Clinical summaries provided to patients or patient-authorized representatives within one business day for more than 50 percent of office visits.

Clinical summaries must now be provided within 1 day rather than 3 days under MU Stage 1. Consider where, when, and for whom the clinical summary will be produced. Is this an action that the providers are expected to complete at the end of each encounter, or will the clinical or non-clinical staff be responsible for providing the Clinical Summary to the patient? It is recommended that you incorporate this activity into your check-out workflows. If there is a way to reduce the burden on the provider, can another staff member do this? This workflow will depend on the office, specialty, and even the provider to determine what works best in their setting.

Allscripts TouchWorks EHR version 11.4.1 allows providers and staff to preview and edit the clinical summary before providing it to the patient. This could be incorporated into any of your documentation or workflows. The clinical summary does not have to be edited or previewed before being produced, but if your providers are going to use this feature it will have an impact on the provider workflow.

If a patient does not want to receive a clinical summary, their Clinical Summary Patient Preferred Communication value should be set to Declined. The system will automatically set this value to Print if the patient is not enrolled in patient portal. The system will automatically set this value to Portal if the patient is or becomes enrolled in patient portal.

Patient Education

Objective:  Use clinically relevant information from Certified EHR Technology to identify patient specific education resources and provide those resources to the patient.

Measure:  Patient-specific education resources identified by Certified EHR Technology are provided to patients for more than 10 percent of all unique patients with office visits seen by the EP during the EHR reporting period.

The measure for providing Patient Education has not changed, but Allscripts TouchWorks EHR version 11.4.1 provides the organization and the provider multiple ways of meeting this measure.  Any instruction orders placed from a Quickset, Careguide, or Order Group will count as providing patient education.  Where the order was placed from is captured in the database and is seen in the order Audit Viewer.  If you set the Info Button Access setting to “Yes” for users who have content subscriptions to the User Management Portal they can then link to outside content vendors to provide patient education.  Additionally, an alert can be set to appear for those users that should be alerted to provide education for the patient visit.

If you are having trouble meeting this measure, identify where your providers and clinical staff are providing patient education and not documenting it in the EHR. Put processes in place to easily document and capture that information into the EHR.  After you decide which of the above ways to provide patient education, you will need to evaluate the impact of introducing any new features into your provider’s and clinical staff’s workflows.

Benjamin Maultsby, IMBA
Consultant, MBA HealthGroup