Meaningful Use

Although "Meaningful Use" ("MU") is strictly a "United States -only" initiative, the philosophy behind "MU" can be applied in other geographies as well.

Under HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act), the United States Department of Health and Human Services sets "meaningful use" of interoperable EHR adoption in the healthcare system as a critical national goal and incentivized EHR adoption.

Three graduated stages for implementing "meaningful use" and EHR certification requirements have been defined. Stage 2 identifies the "image" as "meaningful", ICIS (Imaging Clinical Information System) services platform allows the electronic health record (EHR) to include a complete longitudinal medical imaging record that goes beyond conventional radiology and cardiology images, incorporating medical images and related data from the wide array of departments, such as surgery, endoscopy, ophthalmology, pediatrics, pathology, dermatology, and many others.

There are two benefits of the ICIS approach compared to the traditional method of integrating a (thick) PACS client in the EMR:

Inclusion of both diagnostic and clinical images offering a breadth of content

Consolidation of images from multiple sources in a vendor neutral approach

To summarize, the ICIS platform provides the complete imaging record in the EMR and not just what is available at the level of the PACS.