ehr onc final certification - Department of Health Care Services

Record smoking
status for patients
13 years old or
older
More than 50% of all
unique patients 13 years
old or older seen by the
EP or admitted to the
eligible hospital’s or
CAH’s inpatient or
emergency department
(POS 21 or 23) have
smoking status recorded
as structured data
Interim Final Rule Text:
Smoking status. Enable a user to electronically record,
modify, and retrieve the smoking status of a patient.
Smoking status types must include: current smoker,
former smoker, or never smoked.
Final Rule Text:
§170.302(g)
Smoking status. Enable a user to electronically record,
modify, and retrieve the smoking status of a patient.
Smoking status types must include: current every day
smoker; current some day smoker; former smoker;
never smoker; smoker, current status unknown; and
unknown if ever smoked.
Comments. Several commenters stated that the smoking status certification
criterion was overly prescriptive because it specified certain status variables. These
commenters agreed that recording smoking status is crucial to health improvement
efforts, but contended that mandating certain fields was the wrong approach. Many of
these commenters stated that they were unaware of defined industry standard value set
for smoking terminology and other suggested that our reference to specific types of
smokers be removed. Others asked whether these variables were examples or the only
responses allowed. A few commenters agreed with this certification criterion as
reasonable and appropriate because it would provide value for both clinical care and
public health. Commenters recommended that besides what we had specified, the
certification criterion should also reference packs per day history information,
secondhand smoke exposure, and alcohol consumption information. Other commenters
recommended that the certification criterion be changed to reflect tobacco use rather than
smoking.
Response. We have adopted this certification criterion to fully support the final
meaningful use objective and measure, which in response to comments has been revised
to further clarify the purpose of the objective and measure. We therefore disagree with
those commenters who stated that this certification criterion is too prescriptive.
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