Public Health Registry
Reporting to registries is an integral part of improving population and public health. The Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 regulations added a new public health related menu (optional) objective for Eligible Professionals (EPs), the capability to identify and report specific cases to a specialized registry, other than a cancer registry, except where prohibited, and in accordance with the applicable jurisdictional laws and practice. This objective was included to provide more flexibility in the menu objectives that EPs can choose. Specialized registry reporting is likely to provide many EPs with an MU menu option that is more aligned with their scope of practice. This objective may provide meaningful use credit to those EPs engaged in the beneficial use of Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) to report specific cases and/or case information to specialized registries.
The federal regulations were purposefully general in describing public health registries to provide flexibility and avoid excluding registries.
- Public health registries could include, but are not limited to: birth defects registries, chronic disease registries, and traumatic injury registries etc.
- In addition, public health registries operated by patient safety and quality improvement organizations that enable knowledge generation or process improvement regarding the diagnosis, therapy, and prevention of conditions that affect a population could be considered.
- The public health registries cannot be duplicative of any of the other registries included in other public health measures in the promoting interoperability programs.
Public health registries may be sponsored or maintained by Public Health Agencies (PHAs) or other organizations (e.g., national specialty societies, patient safety organizations, quality improvements organizations).
Under the Promoting Interoperability and related federal programs, the Public Health Registry and Clinical Data Registry Reporting objective includes a measure related to reporting to Public Health Registry, which includes- 1) Cancer Reporting by EPs only to State Cancer Registries. 2) Reporting data by eligible healthcare professionals to CDC/NCHS and hospitals to CDC/NHSN programs for Health Care Surveys and Antibiotic Use (AU) & Antibiotic Resistance (AR) respectively.
More details are available at-
NHSN Meaningful Use Overview (For Hospitals Only)