Seacoast Orthopedics & Sports Medicine (SOSMed) is pleased to announce that their physicians recently achieved Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU2), an incentive program created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for eligible professionals, eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAHs) as they adopt, implement, upgrade or demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health records (EHR) technology.

In order to achieve MU2, each physician at SOSMed was required to report clinical quality measures (CQMs) for all of third quarter, 2014. According to the CMS website, CQMs are tools that help measure and track the quality of health care services provided by eligible professionals, eligible hospitals and CAHs within our health care system. These measures use data associated with providers’ ability to deliver high-quality care or relate to long term goals for quality health care. CQMs measure many aspects of patient care includinghealth outcomes,clinical processes, patient safety, efficient use of health care resources, care coordination, patient engagements, population and public health, and adherence to clinical guidelines. Measuring and reporting CQMs helps to ensure that our health care system is delivering effective, safe, efficient, patient-centered, equitable, and timely care.

“The Meaningful Use experience has taught our team how to better use our EHR and the patient portal to interact with patients and providers and we continue to see benefits,” states Carlos Gonzales, Practice Administrator for SOSMed.

According to CMS data and the American Medical Association, the physicians at SOSMed are among only 2% of eligible providers nationwide to demonstrate Meaningful Use 2.

“Achieving Meaningful Use was not easy,” says Gonzales. “We had to collaborate closely with hospitals, physicians, and even patients and had to change the way physicians, staff, and patients use the EHR and portal. But in the end, it was worth it. We now offer more electronic services to patients and providers, such as patient secure messages to physicians, electronic medication list data from primary care, more convenient electronic forms and documents, automated lab result interfaces, and online bill-pay.”

SOSMed finished the process of submitting attestation data to CMS on October 31. The next step of Meaningful Use requires each physician to meet stage 2 objectives for the entire 2015 calendar year.