Siemens Healthcare announces its latest efforts to help healthcare providers achieve Health IT ‘Meaningful Use’ criteria, continuing its pledge to assist customers in maximizing potential benefits under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA). The company is poised to explore these and other strategic initiatives with providers as it helps recommend and shape language in Washington related to the ongoing nationwide push for greater Health IT adoption.
Steps include providing complimentary, customized ARRA Meaningful Use roadmaps to all current and future customers to establish a clear line-of-sight plan for achieving ARRA Meaningful Use benchmarks within the required timeframe, along with offering new quality reporting tools that, among other things, enable providers to document, validate, and automatically extract data from charts to help expedite the submission of quality measures for reimbursement. Additionally, Siemens has enhanced its existing solutions implementation methodology to ensure that gaps between customers’ current IT solutions and meaningful use are recognized and addressed throughout their installation, education, adoption, and ongoing support plans.
Underscoring the company’s dedication and voice in the national Health IT arena, Siemens also announces its latest employee Health IT-related industry appointments, including Charlene Underwood, director, Government & Industry Affairs, Siemens Healthcare, who in June joined the Meaningful Use Workgroup of the HIT Policy Committee, where she contributes her extensive industry knowledge towards formulating recommendations for defining, revising and proposing meaningful use definitions and national goals. Accompanying her in this space is Siemens Healthcare privacy officer, Don Bechtel, who was appointed in June to serve as the Clinical Operations Workgroup Liaison to the HIT Standards Panel, part of the HIT Standards Committee, which works towards establishing standards that will enable and support widespread interoperability among healthcare software applications in a nationwide health information network. Additionally, IT architect William Geiger now holds a seat on the Advanced Security Workgroup of the Certification Commission HIT (CCHIT), recognized as the certification body for electronic health records, and is joined by fellow colleagues David Tao, MS, D.Sc., senior key expert – Interoperability Champion, and Eric Ringle, RN, MS, product manager, who both maintain existing positions on other CCHIT Workgroups.