Participants:  Nick Dawson Dave DeBronkart, Nancy Finn, John Grohol, Sarah Krug, Josh Seidman, Jon Wald,  Peggy Zuckerman, (David Harlow  policy update)

Minutes – Approved

ACP (American College of Physicians) Update

Danny Sands, MD, MPH, Co-Chair of the SPM Board, has been appointed as the SPM representative to a newly formed Advisory Board of the Center for Patient Partnership in Healthcare (CPPH), recently established by the ACP. A press release has gone out announcing this appointment.
We are also working on a grant proposal with the ACP that would fund a study to develop best practices for physicians around participatory medicine through continuing medical education

Voices Project

Survey and interviews have been completed.  Peggy is working on aggregating all of the results and completing the project by the end of May.

Meaningful Use (MU) Update David Harlow

David has created a briefing memo for the Society’s response to the potential MU changes.  There are two separate issues:

1. Revisions to Stage 2 MU that would scale back the patient engagement measure from 5% of patients to one patient per provider, viewing downloading or transmitting a record. We are calling for the regulation to remain at 5%

2. MU Stage 3 has a three-part requirement on patient engagement, and secure messaging.  The new proposal introduces an alternative way for patients to do secure messaging through APIs and lowers the requirement to 25% of patients who view, load, and download health information via portal or API.  We support the original regulations that would require 35% of patients who view, load or download and engage in secure health information messaging. The proposed changes would also except rural providers from this rule because they do not have access to broadband communication.  Our position is that they all have cellphone communication and therefore should be included in this
A message will be sent to our members urging them to send letters to CMS before the May 29 deadline. David Harlow has provided boilerplate letters that members can use.

SPM Communication

There has been lively discussion on the list serve about ways we communicate to our members.  Several members have offered to help formulate our internal communication policy and they will be part of the new Internal Communication Committee formed by the Board.

External Communication: Ileana Balcu has developed a page for healthcare providers for our website and it has recently gone live.