WASHINGTON--The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced its latest developer challenge for an application to ensure that patients make an appointment with their primary care provider when they return home from a hospital stay.

It is the latest effort by ONC to connect various tools to coordinate care as part of the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) and other health IT and to promote better individual health, population health and lower costs.

[Q&A: ONC's Mostashari on the innovation electronic data will spark.]

Studies have shown that scheduling a follow-up appointment and post-discharge testing before the patient leaves is critical to a safe and effective transition. Ensuring that patients visit their primary care provider shortly after leaving the hospital can help to reduce expensive re-admissions.

But something as simple as scheduling an appointment before leaving the hospital has been a challenge, said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the national health IT coordinator. It’s been difficult because of fragmentation in the healthcare system; hospitals may not know who the patient’s primary care provider is; and the patient’s physician may not know what happened during the patient’s hospitalization

All of this entails consumer, hospital and outpatient provider pieces and there are systems for each one of those.

"There are consumer-facing tools, and there are hospitals with innovative individual delivery networks that do a great job themselves but don’t do a great job integrating with the patient services to help find a doctor’s appointment," Mostashari said.

“What we don’t have are IT tools that can really help bring all those together,” Mostashari told Government Health IT following his remarks at the Jan. 26 Care Innovation Summit. “What we need are lightweight apps to connect hospitals, patients, and outpatient providers,” he said. The summit was hosted by CMS, West Wireless Health Institute and the journal Health Affairs.

ONC has a prize for the winning apps, but it’s not a lot of money, Mostashari said. ONC will bring winners together with communities, like Beacon and other innovative communities, to consider a partnership with them as a pilot test bed and up to $5,000 to support a three-day site visit to the pilot community. Innovators must submit their ideas by April 30 and the winner will be announced May 24.

Mostashari also reiterated his belief that the EHR incentive program would soar in 2012. He anticipates that at least 100,000 providers will receive Medicare or Medicaid meaningful use incentives by the end of this year. 

That may not be too difficult. In 2011, nearly 35,000 physicians and hospitals attested to meaningful use under the Medicare EHR incentive program, with the number jumping in the final three months of the year, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In total, CMS paid out more than $2.5 billion in incentive payments under both the Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs. Medicaid providers received incentives in 2011 primarily for upgrading their systems but will begin to verify meaningful use this year.