Chilmark Research analyst Cora Sharma recently penned a thoughtful post on how mobiles might impact future meaningful use requirements -- and vice versa. Sharma sees future opportunities for mobile in data capture, advanced clinical processes, data sharing and patient engagement. Each of these have ties back to next stage meaningful use requirements.

"Hospitals worried about the compliance of their non-employed physicians would do well to look into the mHealth ecosystem for tools that will encourage these physicians to comply — even though deploying HIS-integrated Apps will entail the usual governance, implementation and security costs," Sharma writes. Sharma sees early adopters performing eRx and formulary checks today, but CPOE, CDS and mission critical clinical processes are not yet wide spread.

One side of meaningful use requirements that should be of particular interest to mobile health: The Patient and Family Engagement goal. This requirement includes "patient reminders, patient preferences for communication channel, online secure patient-physician messaging, timely electronic access to clinical data, bidirectional electronic self-management tools, and more," according to Sharma.

Mobile could help physicians meet this goal by providing patients with reminders via text message or communications through a secure mobile messaging app. And, of course, some patients might find access to their own clinical data and other resources via their mobiles helpful.

Many more details and worthwhile analysis in Sharma's post on future MU requirements and mobile
The image above (known as a "Wordle") was created by Lygeia Ricciardi and posted on Ted Eytan's blog in August. It's a graphical representation of the meaningful use document -- More about the Wordle in the original post that contained it here.