For months, applicants who sought stimulus dollars to implement electronic health record projects have been in something of a holding pattern. They’ve been waiting for rules defining the so-called  “meaningful use” standards necessary for this funding. These rules were finally released the day before yesterday. They include 23 and 25 mandatory requirements (for hospitals and doctors, respectively) and 10 optional ones, of which providers must choose five.

The effort was to strike a fine balance between encouraging advancement in EHRs and attempting to make sure that the dollars would be spent on appropriate efforts with a high chance of success.

As David Blumenthal, the Department of Health and Human Service's national coordinator for health information technology, and Marilyn Tavenner, principal deputy administrator of CMS, wrote in a summary of the rules the key was for the regulations to be “both ambitious and achievable.”

We spoke with Christine Bechtel, vice-president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, about these final rules. Bechtel sat on the Meaningful Use Working Group, which helped set the draft proposal for this work. She  told us, “We want to balance having a very broad array of providers who can participate in this program, but at the same time make sure those providers are really delivering significant benefits for patients and families. We think the administration has hit the mark."

However, Bechtel also notes that she would have preferred that certain of the objectives pertaining to patient access to information and providing patients with healthcare education materials would have been made mandatory rather than optional. For example, one of the optional standards requires providing patient-specific education materials to more than 10% of patients. “Those things are really high impact and high value for patients.” She adds that she hopes providers will “see the writing on the wall” and adopt those optional provisions now, rather than waiting for 2013 when they will become mandatory anyway. “You can’t improve health outcomes without improving patient access to health info and patient healthcare education materials.”

That said, she also points out that she was very pleased to see some of the mandatory requirements such as providing patients with a summary of every office visit. “That’s big—getting a copy of your health information within 72 hours,” she says, noting that current regulations require that information only within 30 days.