Enhancing patient and family engagement through Meaningful Use Stage 3: opportunities and barriers to implementation

The proposed Patient and Family Engagement objectives for Meaningful Use Stage 3 (MU3) seek to provide patients with increased access to, and control over, the content and dissemination of their electronic health record (EHR) information.

Implementation study conducted from 2013-2014.

In this study, 2 leading US health systems attempted to implement 4 draft MU3 objectives within their current EHR system. Senior staff provided qualitative feedback on their implementation experience; researchers used content analysis to identify major themes and implementation challenges.

We found that the draft objectives would support the MU3 Patient and Family Engagement goals, but that all objectives would benefit from the following: changes in policy language to promote flexibility in implementation; training and workflow adaptions, as well as patient education, by healthcare organizations; and new EHR functionalities.

In the short term, a semi-automated approach is likely necessary to support MU3 objective implementation. These challenges are not unique to MU3 and underscore gaps in the current health information infrastructure.