Meeting Meaningful Use Objectives With DynaMed And Patient Education Reference Center From EBSCO Publishing

Point of Care Resources from EBSCO Publishing Designed to Enable Healthcare Technology to be Patient-Centered, Evidence-Based and Prevention-Oriented

Hospitals and clinicians around the country are working to implement electronic heath records (EHR) and demonstrate Meaningful Use. While the focus is on the technology involved, there are objectives designed to ensure that clinicians and patients have access to the latest medical information. Resources such as DynaMed and Patient Education Reference Center (PERC) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) can be integrated into any EHR system. Integration of EBSCO resources provides premium options for hospitals and health care providers who need to incorporate evidence-based medical information, patient education information and discharge instructions into EHR systems in compliance with Meaningful Use objectives.

As a part of the provisions of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the federal government has allocated funds to encourage increased usage of EHR technology by hospitals and clinicians. This provision—the HITECH Act—will provide incentive payments administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to eligible professionals, eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals that adopt and successfully implement "meaningful use" of certified EHR systems. Between now and the year 2015, hospitals and eligible providers participating in Medicare and Medicaid will need to meet HITECH EHR requirements in order to receive bonus payments and avoid penalties.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has outlined three stages of Meaningful Use, however, Stage One is the one stage that is currently defined. The criteria for Stage One Meaningful Use are based on a series of "core" objectives that must all be met and a set of ten "menu" objectives of which hospitals and eligible providers must meet any five.

DynaMed provides the evidence-based information that is an important component of creating clinical decision support rules under Meaningful Use (Core Set Objective 10). Being able to access DynaMed's evidence-based clinical information from within the EHR allows healthcare providers to make decisions based on the latest medical evidence, supporting a patient-centric approach to medicine and improving patient care. In addressing the one clinical decision support rule addressed by Meaningful Use, DynaMed:

• Features clinically organized summaries for more than 3,200 topics
• Provides daily updates offering current clinical information that represents the best available evidence to inform the decision process
• Is structured to support the notification elements (treatment overview, testing to consider, rule out, warnings for medications) that are most important in clinical practice
• Allows users to answer clinical questions or view the evidence supporting the decision-making
• Is an invaluable tool for answering clinical questions at the point of care

Patient Education Reference Center helps to meet two Meaningful Use objectives—Patient Discharge Instructions (Core Set Objective 12) and Patient-Specific Education Resources (Menu Set Objective Measure 5).

Patient Discharge Instructions
PERC provides customizable discharge instructions to ensure that patients have all of the information they need to continue the care process at home.

• More than 1000 customizable discharge instructions and home care information
• Content is evidence-based and updated regularly (as the evidence dictates)
• Clinicians can include special instructions and discharge information for patients according to their individual needs
• Clinicians are able to add relevant hospital/clinician contact information in case patients have further questions

Patient-Specific Education Resources
PERC features a comprehensive collection of more than 12,000 current, evidence-based patient education handouts for clinicians to print and distribute right at the point-of-care.

• Handouts are easy to read, include illustrations, and are structured to enhance patient knowledge and understanding of material
• Content is available in Spanish, and select content is available in 15 additional languages
• Print handouts as needed, eliminating the need to store quantities of handouts that may quickly go out of date and never be used

EBSCO Publishing works with all electronic health record providers to integrate DynaMed's clinical content and discharge instructions from PERC into customer workflows and make the content available at the point of care. For more information, visit www.ebscohost.com/pointofcare or http://www.ebscohost.com/pointofcare/emr-integration.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world's premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical librarians, social workers, hospital administrators, etc.). The company's product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL, DynaMed, Nursing Reference Center, Patient Education Reference Center, Rehabilitation Reference Center, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source and SocINDEX as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE, PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit www.ebscohost.com.

SOURCE: EBSCO Publishing