Meaningful Use

You can now watch videos of each Meaningful Use Criteria. 

You will find each meaningful use criteria, its definition and a link to watch the relevant video.

http://www.waitingroomsolutions.com/wrs/meaningful-use-videos

The Final Rule – Meaningful Use

The final Meaningful Use criteria have been released to the medical provider community. Since the Stage 1 requirements have been completed, physicians and hospitals that have been hesitant in the past can move forward with in their EHR selections. The Stage 2 criteria are expected to focus on structured data exchange and continuous quality improvement. CMS is scheduled to release the second phase criteria by the end of 2011.The Stage 3 criteria are expected to center on advanced decision support and population health. CMS is scheduled to publish the third phase criteria by the end of 2013.

We have been helping clients develop the Meaningful Use plan, now we have a significant relaxation of several compliance requirements and we reviewing the final rule in detail to provide our clients and prospects with an accurate road to Meaningful Use at Waiting Room Solutions.

WRS is providing clients, prospects, and other industry professionals – with the knowledge needed to help them accomplish the goals of ARRA and impending Health Care Reform under the new Patient Protection Act.

 

Implementation Schedule

Date

Description

 

1-Jul-10

ONC-Authorized testing & certification body approvals for applications

 

Fall - 2010

ONC certified EHR software available for purchase

 

Jan-11

Eligible Providers and Hospital registration with CMS for EHR incentives

 

 

Medicare & Medicaid incentives at a virtual location managed by CMS

 

Apr-11

Attestations for Medicare Program starts for Eligible providers and Hospitals

 

May-11

Incentive payments for Medicare begins

 
               

States on a rolling basis will be initiating incentive programs, subject to CMS approval to implement and oversee incentive program as per State Medicaid HIT plan.

The proposed rule initially called on eligible professionals to meet 25 requirements (23 for hospitals) in their use of EHRs, however the requirements for meaningful use incentives now are divided into core requirements that are mandatory and a menu of 10 additional requirements—of which five needs to be met.

Only 15 core requirements are now mandatory for eligible providers and 14 are mandatory for hospitals. The percentage of patients that are required to qualify as meaningful users has been lowered for many of the criteria. This approach was designed to make sure that the basic elements of meaningful EHR would be met by all providers qualifying for incentive payments.

The Final Rule for Meaningful use specify what physicians and hospitals will have to do to receive up to $27 billion in bonus Medicare payments for adoption of electronic health records.

For EP --- As added by section 4101(a) of the HITECH Act, it requires that as a condition of eligibility for the incentive payment, an EP must demonstrate
meaningful use of certified EHR technology of this final rule in the manner specified by the Secretary, which may include the following: an attestation, the submission of claims with
appropriate coding, a survey response, reporting of clinical quality or other measures, or other means. In the final regulation, it will require that for CY 2011, EPs demonstrate that they satisfy each of the fifteen objectives and their associated measures of the core set listed at Table 3 and five of the objectives and their associated measures from the menu set listed at Table 3.1.

History of "Meaningful Use"

DECEMBER 2009: National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released documents to qualify for incentives for physicians and hospitals which use “certified EHR technology” in a meaningful approach.

Healthcare serves more efficiently due to the meaningful use of Electronic Health Records, which is taking over the traditional paper based medical records. It rules out for the critical medical mistakes, physicians make due to illegible hand written paper records. Electronic records help with the standardization of forms, terminology and abbreviations, and data input. In contrast, EHRs can be continuously updated and records can be exchanged between different EHR systems for healthcare delivery in non-affiliated and remote healthcare facilities.

Some EHR systems automatically monitor clinical events, by analyzing patient data from an Electronic Health Record to predict, detect and potentially prevent adverse events. Also the data can be used anonymously for statistical reporting making it possible to improve quality of service provided and mainly public health communicable disease surveillance.