Is Your Doctor a MeaningfulUser

For my Consumer Health Informatics class, I developed a presentation for patients to help them figure out whether or not their doctor was Tech Savvy.  One of the questions they could ask was whether or not their doctor was a Meaningful User or participated in the CMS EHR Incentive Program.  Sometimes you have to ask the question one way, and sometimes another to get a good answer.  Not everybody knows what these terms mean.

There are ways other than asking that you can find this out, but it really takes a computer to work it out for a patient.  Provider NPI data identifies providers by name, organization, license number, practice location address and specialties.  You can get that data here.  These are all different ways you can search for providers, and it can also support, with the aid of some good mapping data sets, geo-searching (e.g., find provider within 20 miles of my location).

CMS also provides information about which providers and hospitals have received meaningful use payments. That data set tells you, by NPI, which providers have been paid under Meaningful Use, and the program year number and date (by which you can determine stage of meaningful use), and their reported results for core and menu set measures, and the EHR they use (by the EHR Certification number assigned).

So, there is nothing stopping ANYONE from finding a a doctor within 50 miles, that met a particular set of core and menu set measures, at a particular stage of meaningful use, using a particular EHR.  Well, except for a small matter of programming.  Because really, searching through all that data isn't possible without a computer.

I'm hoping some enterprising visualization and/or data geeks will take on this challenge (This would be a great addition to ONC's HealthIT Dashboard).  Because I'm probably going to be needing to find a new doctor after I move (staying in the same county, but moving to a bigger house, just far enough away to make it challenging to keep my old one), and the last thing I want to do is figure it out the hard way.