As long-term and post-acute care facilities play catch-up when it comes to electronic health records, an industry group has given these providers their own model for EHR adoption.
The LeadingAge Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) has updated its white paper on EHRs for long-term and post-acute care to include its seven-stage CAST EHR Adoption Model. The release includes a number of tools, including an interactive product selection guide and a matrix listing capabilities of LTC EHRs from various vendors.
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If it recalls the HIMSS Analytics EMRAM scale, it’s not a coincidence. Washington-based LeadingAge, which represents more than 6,000 not-for-profit providers of aging services, drew heavily from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society‘s model.
The CAST EHR Adoption Model also is based on models from eldercare IT vendor PointClickCare and the 10-stage Savage–Gutkind Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model for LTC. The latter is popular outside North America, said CAST Executive Director Majd Alwan.
“These models are more for acute care,” Alwan said. “Ours can be applied to a broad number of long-term and post-acute care environments.” These include rehabilitation, transitional care, assisted living, skilled nursing, home health, palliative care, hospice and more.
The stages do parallel the HIMSS EMRAM in some ways, though CAST tried to make the recommendations as generic as possible, according to Alwan.
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Each stage has a few required “core” functionalities, but many optional items specific to different types of post-acute care. For example, in Stage 5, EHRs for rehab facilities must be interoperable with physical and occupational therapists’ systems, Alwan said. This wouldn’t necessarily apply to assisted living, however.
Long-term and post-acute care lag hospitals and physician practices when it comes to health IT because they were excluded from the $35 billion Meaningful Use EHR incentive program. Only at HIMSS16 in early March did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally announce limited Medicaid health IT incentives for those providers.
In April, health IT connectivity network Surescripts teamed with PointClickCare to offer e-prescribing services for LTC.
Photo: Mutlu Kurtbas/Getty Images
