The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Meaningful Use initiative was established to encourage radiologists and other physicians to adopt electronic health records for use in their burgeoning practices. EHRs would allow health care providers to document and track medical data, eventually to be used across practices in health information exchange.
As part of Meaningful Use, clinicians who successfully leverage EHR software in their facilities receive reimbursement payments from the CMS for their active participation in the EHR incentive program. According to Clinical Innovation, to date, the federal government has paid out more than $24 billion to providers who demonstrated the Meaningful Use of EHRs.
“The $24 billion does not include the Medicaid investments that are going on now and will continue until 2020,” said Karen DeSalvo, M.D., National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, at a Federal Trade Commission Event last month, as quoted by the news source.
Managing the programs
Back in 2012, the CMS had estimated that $22.5 billion would be sufficient to cover all of the EHR programs – both Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, it was a drop from its original estimate in 2009 of roughly $27 billion. For Medicare, incentive payments are scheduled to run through 2016, while Medicaid could continue for the next six years into 2020. For that portion of the program, DeSalvo approximated that upcoming Medicaid payouts could include an additional $16 billion.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is now working on strategies to gather information from providers who are not eligible for the Meaningful Use Program.
“We still have some pretty important gaps in the capture of good health information,” said DeSalvo. “There are many more in the care continuum where, frankly, some of the sickest of the sick of our community are receiving services and we’re not yet able to capture information in a standardized way.”
EHR testing a challenge
As part of the second stage of the Meaningful Use program, the transition of care objective stipulates that providers must conduct successful electronic exchanges of summary of care documents with disparate EHR systems. Additionally, providers could engage in one or more tests with a sample EHR from the CMS. The testing program was launched in January, and the federal agency is looking to add more vendors, according to FierceEMR.
Currently, more than 500 providers have signed up for testing, but some may still be confused about the details of the process. Additionally, they may not be accessing the proper resources that could seamlessly guide them along the training modules. The ONC has simplified the steps for registration and made guidance available on the website for the program.
EHRs in the testing program are registered on a software system called “EHR Randomizer.” This database randomly matches providers to a test EHR that was designed by a different EHR vendor than their own. This can be significantly beneficial to medical imaging facilities that wish to integrate scans into their digital records. With increased interoperability, physicians could execute better health information sharing across practices for the continuum of care.
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Ronny Bachrach
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