By Jim Tate, EMR Advocate
Meaningful Use Audit Expert
Twitter: @JimTate, eMail: audits@emradvocate.com
Kudos to those front runners who are focusing on “patient engagement (PE)”. The inaugural HIMSS Patient Engagement Summit this week in Orlando is bringing together major stakeholders as well as an assorted mix of social media warriors. The attendees run the gamut from government bureaucrats to patient rights visionaries. It is a petri dish and I feel right at home. Hyperbolic descriptions are being showered on us like the Central Florida monsoon I got caught in today. “Biggest thing in healthcare since antibiotics” and “holy grail” are just a few I’ve heard. I must admit I’m guilty of slinging a few of those phrases around myself. Is PE going to be the Next Big Thing in health care?
Plain and simple, here is what is known. Health care is going through a massive disruption. A flashpoint is coming, the fuse has been lit and I can smell the burning powder.
Now one of the things I love about these conferences is the opportunity to see things I have never seen before. Well, it didn’t take me too long to spot something unique. I saw a tattoo unlike any I had ever seen before. It was a QR code. That’s right, a scanable image that leads to a patient health record. At first I thought it was a temporary tattoo like the type my 10 year old daughter 
applies to my arm whenever she catches me napping. But it is real and you can see it says “Scan Before Treatment”. At the bottom of the tattoo is a password that I have obscured in deference to the Ten Commandments of HIPAA. The brave soul who possesses this tattoo is none other than Casey Quinlan, the infamous social media bomb thrower and general all around rule breaker. Casey graciously gave me permission to share this story and I thank her for pushing the limits. I recommend following her on Twitter (@MightyCasey). Now I’m not saying we all need to get tattoos like Casey, but it is a good idea to keep an eye on the rebels when disruption abounds. Breakthroughs will be coming from the edges, not from the center. Patient engagement is a movement being propelled by a perfect storm of technology, patient empowerment, and governmental support. It was Saint Zimmerman who sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In the case of what is exploding before us I have to agree. We don’t need a white paper to tell us what is happening.
Jim Tate is known as the most experienced authority on the CMS Meaningful Use (MU) audit and appeal process. His unique combination of skills has brought successful outcomes to hospitals at risk of having their CMS EHR incentives recouped. He led the first appeal challenge in the nation for a client hospital that had received a negative audit determination. That appeal was decided in favor of the hospital. He has also been successful in leading the effort to reverse a failed appeal, even after the hospital had received notification of the failure with the statement, “This decision is final and not subject to further appeal”. That “final” decision was reversed in less than a week. If you are a hospital with questions or concerns about the meaningful use audit process, contact him at: audits@emradvocate.com.