Raimey: There are a couple of things that stand out. For one, across the banner across the top you see ‘About the Community.’ If you click on that it actually gives you a self-guided tour, so that if no one was available, you could go in, take the tour, and get started uploading a profile. Another very cool thing is we have a panel of experts, that space that says, ‘Meet the Experts’ is a space where you can see photos and a brief biography of the expert who are real live people that are employed with us who have many years of experience in different aspects of healthcare. So it won’t be folks hiding behind the scenes.The other area that I want to point out is the ‘Spotlight’ on the left hand side. We’ll change that every few days to bring you some news or an area that we want to highlight, so that will be updated. We encourage people to come back every couple of days to check out what’s new on the site.HCI: There are so many social networks out there. How are you going to support this community and nurture its dialogue?Raimey: We want to get the word out through traditional healthcare journals and associations. We’ll also get the word out through our clients that we talk to on a day-to-day basis. And then we’re going to encourage our clients to reach out to other members of the healthcare community and talk about what they experience is on our site. And then as people come and they join, we’ll see discussions, and we’ll ask who else they know might benefit from learning about meaningful use. I think this will stem a lot of discussion, and people will have good experiences and reach out to their peers, as well as other organizations that could benefit from this site.HCI: Are you reaching out to sister organizations for partnerships?Raimey: We have something in the works with one organization that has a social media site. I don’t want to mention it yet because we haven’t ironed out the plans yet. There are some talks about a partnership, and were in discussions with them as we speak.HCI: What are your thoughts on the final rule and the flexibility that was added in?Raimey: Our country has been waiting so long from a healthcare standpoint to have electronic health records. This encourages not only the adoption because it’s expensive; it also gives people the opportunity to go out seek implementation of electronic health record because there are incentives involved.Part of the flexibility gives providers a little bit of breathing room to meet meaningful use, and therefore, it’s more realistic to incentivize in getting all aspects of the electronic health record installed when it comes down to physician documentation to CPOE to having a health information exchange, as well as report quality measures that are so needed because reporting quality measures goes back to improving quality within the organization. I wasn’t surprised by the ruling.HCI: What are your goals for the members of the healthcare community who use this site?Raimey: I would tell them three things. The first and the most important is that this community is truly for the community. By that I mean that we encourage people to come, join, and put information about themselves. We encourage them to share information about their experiences with electronic health records, whether they are just beginning down the road, or they’re somewhat there, or they’ve implemented it and want to share some best practices.The second thing we want to say is this community is something we want people to continue to come back to. They’ll find that more people will be joining; they’ll have fresher ideas, and this will be a trusted site where they’ll get real information without having someone sell them a service.For more information on CSC's analysis of the Meaningful Use final rule, click here.
