Sending patient reminders based upon clinically relevant data is now a core measure for Meaningful Use Stage 2.  The required threshold is 10% of unique patients that have been seen by an eligible provider at least twice in the past 24 months.

Initially, the best approach is to generate several general patient lists based upon specific conditions to gauge where your providers stand in terms of meeting that 10% threshold.  From there, you could slowly make the queries more specific to narrow the population down near 10%.

Since this is based upon the patients’ preferred communication methods, we recommend not defining too broad of a patient population.  Your organization will be responsible for calling your patients and for printing and mailing these reminder letters, both which can be costly and time consuming.  This serves as all the more motivation to encourage patients to enroll and use your patient portal.

A qualifier for this measure requires that the reminder be for follow up or preventive care that the patient is not already scheduled to receive.  For example, it would not be acceptable to send patients reminders about an annual visit that had been previously scheduled, though sending a reminder to schedule an annual mammogram or get a yearly flu shot does count towards the numerator.  If your organization needs any help generating queries or defining patient populations to help you meet this measure, the staff at Galen can gladly assist you.