It’s hard to believe that 9 months ago the term meaningful use wasn’t in our everyday vocabulary. Now it is top of mind and a topic of nearly every health IT strategy meeting. While a final definition isn’t now expected until Q2 2010, for sure it will include reporting quality measures and being able to share information among clinics, hospitals and government health agencies.

Healthcare has tried and failed several times before to build sustainable, robust IT networks to share patient records, medical histories and test results among multiple facilities and caregivers across similar geographies.

Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) in February, much debate and a flurry of activity has centered on the economic encouragement offered to healthcare providers for the adoption and use of EMRs.

WellStar Health System—a not-for-profit system in Atlanta comprised of five hospitals and a 400-physician group practice—is dedicated to providing world-class healthcare for a community of 600,000.

Meaningful use. Learn those two words. Understand them. They likely will consume our professional lives for years to come—if they haven’t already begun to. Meaningful use is, of course, the standard by which hospitals and medical practice will qualify for federal stimulus funding for adopting electronic health records. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the health IT portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, calls for providers to demonstrate “meaningful use” of health IT starting in 2011.

Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s leading healthcare facility, has upped the ante once again with the debut late last year of a new cardiac care facility equipped with state-of-the-art imaging with sophisticated diagnostic and treatment technology that is smoothly integrated with enterprise-wide clinical IT systems.

With the national push toward EMR adoption being urged by the financial incentives of the HITECH Act and the mindset that “now is the time,” healthcare executives, physicians, clinicians, IT leaders and IT vendors are scrambling to define the ideal method of incorporating medical images, most often native to PACS, into the EMR while improving interoperability among departments and without creating additional storage burdens.

As physicians, we have a profound influence on others who look to us for leadership. If clinical leaders are disengaged and misaligned with an organizational mission, change strategies can fail before they begin. Where physicians go, the rest of the organization will follow—and the most successful healthcare leaders in the nation have figured this out.

Interoperability—making disparate information systems communicate with each other—represents a tremendous undertaking for every 21st century healthcare provider. At the same time, it is a business essential. Who’s got the right strategy? Check out some options

They’re everywhere. Mobile computers are on the move in the ER and OR, atop carts as physicians make rounds, and in the hands of nurses logging vital signs at the bedside or dispensing meds. With the growing adoption of EMRs, mobile computing use among hospital-based clinicians has moved beyond standalone, knowledge-based applications such as drug reference databases and medical calculators to systems that can increase clinician productivity, reduce errors and eliminate inefficient processes.

The idea of meaningful use, mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has been whittled down into defining the enigmatic term “meaningful.” In this search, discussions within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) have focused on the practice of medicine, not the implementation of IT. If the meaningful use of information systems does not have an obvious and profound impact on the safety and quality of healthcare, then it ceases to have meaning.