Part 1: Medicare EHR Incentive Program
As we rapidly approach the beginning of the anticipated meaningful use incentives, it is becoming increasingly important to clearly define all of the details surrounded eligibility, attestation and MU requirements. To begin, the MU incentives are based on individual providers – therefore, if you are part of a group practice, each eligible professional can individually qualify for the incentive payments if they demonstrate meaningful use.
Under the Medicare EHR Incentive Program, an eligible provider (EP) must be one of the following:
- Doctors of Medicine or Osteopathy
- Doctors of Dental Surgery or Dental Medicine
- Doctors of Podiatric Medicine
- Doctors of Optometry
- Chiropractors
***Note: A doctor is considered ‘hospital based’ and will not qualify as an EP if they perform 90% or more of their services in a hospital inpatient or emergency room setting.
The first step towards becoming eligible is to purchase a certified technology system. This system must allow you to meet 15 of the core and 5 of the 10 menu requirements to allow you to attest meaningful use of your system. Once this has been completed, there are a few requirements that must be met to register to take place in the program:
- All EPs must have a National Provider Identifier (NPI)
- All EPs must be enrolled in the CMS Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS)
- The PECOS system will also be used to attest MU compliance, but the exact details of this build-out are still being developed.
- Most EPs will need to have an active user account in the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES)
**Note: If you are an EP that does not have an NPI and/or an NPPES user account, click here to apply.
Medicare EPs that meet the necessary MU criteria will receive an incentive payment equal to 75% of their Medicare allowable charges for covered professional services – with a maximum payment of $44,000. It is important to get started by Jan. 1, 2011 to ensure that you will receive the first round of payment checks.
EPs can participate in the Medicare EHR incentive program as soon as the Federal program launches in 2011. To be eligible for the first round of payments around May, 2011 providers must demonstrate meaningful use for a minimum of 90 consecutive days to receive the full year’s credit. With this stated, it is clear that no providers will be able to attest to compliance prior to April.
Those that plan to meet the Medicare ARRA incentive criteria will be allowed to receive both the meaningful use payments and the PQRI payments in the same year, but will not be allowed to receive the MU payments during the same year as the MIPPA e-prescribing payments.
Coming up next: Part 2: Medicaid EHR Incentive Program
Our nation’s health
care system is undergoing a massive transformation to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care. To catalyze this transformation CMS has create the ARRA HITECH incentive program for eligible Medicare and Medicaid providers who demonstrate ‘meaningful use’.
These providers will not only reap benefits from the financial payments, but will see a reduction in errors, higher availability of records and data, new reminders and alerts, and unprecedented clinical support and electronic prescribing capabilities.
Beginning next year, eligible physicians who see Medicare and/or Medicaid patients will be compensated from $44,000 to $65,000 over a 5 year term for fulfilling the recently defined ‘meaningful use’ criteria. To further promote the use of certified systems, if these same physicians do not utilize healthcare IT that meets the Federal requirement by 2015, they will be faced with increasing penalties of up to 5%.
One very important part of these incentives is the ability for providers to implement individual certified modules that when used together, meet the meaningful use criteria. Many doctors believe that a paperless EHR is the only way to reach meaningful use, but it is important for them to realize that they have options to use modular systems to achieve the requirements!
Stayed tuned to our blog as we dissect the upcoming Meaningful Use incentives – see below for a schedule of topics to come:
- Part 1: Medicare
- What is required and how do I get paid?
- Who is eligible?
- How hard is it to meet?
- Part 2: Medicaid
- State specific requirements
- What does Modular Approach Mean?
- What is a Patient Registry?
- What is Attestation?
- Checklist for Meeting MU: What are the 15 components and 5 (10) Menu items?
- Should you go paperless or not? Is your office ready?
- Questions you should ask your EMR?
- What’s in a guarantee for MU?
- Who are the certification bodies?
- What is expected for stage 2?
- MU 101: Final Review
From 2:30 – 4:00 pm Thursday, September 2, CMS will host a national provider conference call to answer any questions regarding the 2010 Physician Quality Reporting Incentive (PQRI) and electronic prescribing incentive program.
This call will directly follow a formal presentation outlining how to begin participating in these programs. If you would like to review the slides before logging onto the call, visit the CMS website to download the presentation.
To register for the phone call and reserve your line, visit http://www.eventsvc.com/palmettogba/090210 and fill in the required information.
If you cannot attend the conference call but would like to read the transcript, it will be available one week after the call on the CMS website.
There is a lot to keep up with living in DC, but in the recent article, Health IT heats up in Washington Dr. Kevin Fickenscher discuses today’s hot topics in our nation’s capital. Yes, you guessed it– Health Information Technology is at the top of the list.
Dr. Fickenscher connects the dots between the recent buzz in HIT and the ongoing growth of mobile technologies in our country. He sheds light on a recent event in which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signed a memo of joint cooperation that will allow them to work together to manage wireless medical devices. “With the FCC already having released the National Broadband Plan, the use of wireless devices in the medical community will only continue to grow and the government needs to be prepared for the huge wave of growth anticipated in the health care arena. As a tool for reducing costs, enhancing service and driving quality of care, wireless technologies are an imperative for health care innovation.”
Although hype is building, the symbiotic relationship between HIT and mobile technologies has already been proven successful. Just as mobile online banking applies to the financial industry, e-prescribing is one example of how wireless technology has already worked to enhance all aspects of the health care environment. Providers can access e-prescribing software via wireless networks to electronically prescribe medicines anywhere, including at the point of care, and send these prescriptions straight to the pharmacy with click of a button.
Washington has played a huge role over the past few years in passing legislation to kick-start HIT adoption, and will surely remain involved as we watch the recently defined ‘meaningful use’ incentives come to fruition.
Over the past several months there has been a surge in conversation and hype regarding the upcoming Meaningful Use incentive payments. Until now, the focus of this discussion has been centered around the requirements and payments to, what the CMS has deemed, ‘eligible providers.’ In a recent letter sent by the CMS, steps are outlined for states to receive matching federal funds for administrative expenses related to the MU payment programs. These requirements have recently been summarized in an iHealthbeat article, proving that the the state’s voluntary situation when it comes to the payments is being promoted by the federal governement.
Under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health records will receive incentive payments through Medicaid and Medicare. States can receive a 90% federal funding match for incentive payments distributed to Medicaid providers who adopt EHRs under the meaningful use criteria.
To warrant this payment matching, the CMS has asked state entities to perform a few responsibilities including:
- create and enhance data warehouses
- develop interfaces with data repositories and HIEs
- establish master patient indexes
- organize workshops, meetings and webinars to promote education
- administer the incentive payments to those that qualify
- track MU attestations
- pursue programs to promote the adoption of certified EHRs
These requirements seem to be aimed at building the amount of stored clinical data for future IT systems, as well as to take some of the administrative burdens off of the federal government. Jessica Kahn, technical director for health IT at CMS, proposes that “states should no wait until every detail has been released before starting their incentive programs.” She goes on to say that the CMS’ letter recommends approaching the program incrementally. With new incentives such as this, it seems clear that state agencies will be pushing to identify those systems that qualify E.P.’s for meaningful use without the cost of a full-blown EMR.
Volo Agitato (Shaking Flight) by Futurist, Tullio Crali, 1938
As I reflect on the rapid evolution of information and communication technology, not only in our worldwide civil societies, but even in what we might describe as “uncivil” societies, I realize that at least in healthcare this has almost become a revolution.
It is not violent in the form that induced Marinetti to eventually support Mussolini and Fascism in pre-war Italy’s 1930s and early 1940s, but its speed and disruptive nature have foreshadowed and accelerated the virtual destruction of libraries and museums.
When I can do an instantaneous search online for every image or video of the visual arts and all important handwritten or printed hardcopy material, not to mention music…why would I need to support a library or museum? … (a rhetorical question since I hope the reader knows the answer lies in the nature of the human condition).
Is the mobile internet and the smartphone a “killer combination” and stealth WMD?
In any case, we are living in a wonderful age where patient care has been enhanced immeasurably with the IT tools we are seeing now and it will continue in this positive, though very disruptive trend for years into the future.
We can celebrate the vision and insight of Marinetti without embracing his excess, always mindful of George Santayana’s 1905 epigram:
“Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.”
