ePublic Health & Informatics

The Stage 2 Meaningful Use (MU) Public Health Reporting Requirements Task Force, recently released the first set of Stage 2 MU Public Health Agencies (PHAs) Readiness Guidance document on April 8th. The document represents the evolving understanding of how Stage 2 Meaningful Use regulations will be implemented for public health.

PHAs are strongly encouraged, though not required, to support MU2 public health objectives. These objectives represent tremendous opportunities for PHAs to improve their surveillance capabilities. Providers in public health jurisdictions that lack the capacity to support MU2 objectives will be exempted from meeting those objectives. Furthermore, MU2 regulations for the public health objectives suggest that PHAs also need to perform four (4) new administrative tasks to fully support MU2. PHAs will need to develop these processes prior to the start of MU2 (10/01/2013 for Eligible Hospitals and 01/01/2014 for Eligible Professionals). These processes are:

• Publicize what MU2 objectives the PHA will support and share this information with the proposed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) centralized PHA capacity repository (Declaration of Readiness process),
• Register Providers that plan to submit public health data to a PHA for MU2 objectives (Registration of Intent process),
• Test and validate on-going data submissions from Providers (On-Boarding process), 
• Provide written communication(s) (which may be in electronic format) to Providers that have achieved ongoing submission of data relevant to public health for MU2 objectives.(Acknowledgements process).

To learn more about Meaningful Use and what it means for local health departments visit our page here. Please click on the 'more' link to download the Stage 2 MU PHA Readiness Guidance document.

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