 |
A Great Opportunity That Takes Work
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and starting in January 2011 through 2015, your practice can qualify for EHR incentive payments of up to $44k/provider under Medicare or up to $65k/provider under Medicaid if your use of a CCHIT-certified EHR achieves a standard known as “Meaningful Use” (MU). For example, a practice with 2 physicians and 1 nurse practitioner could earn up to $195k in incentives. Since the total maximum incentive payment lowers with each successive year, many practices are starting to assess their use of EHRs against the current draft MU metrics that will be finalized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Spring 2010. Given the long lead times for implementing or modifying EHR deployments, many practices targeting receiving the maximum possible incentive payments have started assessing where they stand relative to the MU metrics. Some proposed metrics are :
-
%
of patients with recorded BMI
-
%
of orders for medications and lab tests entered directly by physicians
through CPOE
-
%
of lab results incorporated into EHR in coded format
-
%
of claims submitted electronically to all payers
-
%
of patient encounters with insurance eligibility confirmed
-
%
of encounters for which clinical summaries were provided
EHR vendors' Meaningful Use guarantees usually only guarantee that the EHR will be CCHIT-certified for MU, not that providers will actually achieve the MU metrics. Providers need to take things into their own hands to have a fighting chance of receiving incentive dollars.
But MGMA predicts that more than 50% of physician practices will not achieve MU1. The reasons why reflect that the process is complex and exhaustive:
- Must achieve all 25 metrics described in 556 pages of regulations
- Just getting a MU-certified EHR is not enough
- Workflows and user behaviors likely need to be changed
- MU standard will be further raised in 2013 and 2015
- Reporting MU status to CMS is a labor-intensive process
The bottom line is that providers will need major preparation to earn their MU incentive dollars.
Learn how The MU PackageTM removes the heavy lifting
---
1. Ready or Not? Probably not, says MGMA. Healthcare IT News, October 13, 2009.
|
|
