Enhancing patient and family engagement through Meaningful Use Stage 3: opportunities and barriers to implementation.

Objectives: The proposed Patient and Family Engagement objectives for Meaningful Use Stage 3 (MU3) seek to provide patients with increased access to, and control over, the content and dissemination of their electronic health record (EHR) information.

Study Design: Implementation study conducted from 2013-2014.

Methods: In this study, 2 leading US health systems attempted to implement 4 draft MU3 objectives within their current EHR system. Senior staff provided qualitative feedback on their implementation experience; researchers used content analysis to identify major themes and implementation challenges.

Results: We found that the draft objectives would support the MU3 Patient and Family Engagement goals, but that all objectives would benefit from the following: changes in policy language to promote flexibility in implementation; training and workflow adaptions, as well as patient education, by healthcare organizations; and new EHR functionalities.

Conclusions: In the short term, a semi-automated approach is likely necessary to support MU3 objective implementation. These challenges are not unique to MU3 and underscore gaps in the current health information infrastructure.