It behooves practitioners and institutions to act sooner rather than later to reap their fair share of incentive payments in exchange for the dollar and time investment needed to implement certified Stage 1 “meaningful use” IT.
It can help improve patient safety while lowering long-range costs.
The Stage 1 provision focuses primarily on electronic data capture, such as that facilitated by electronic health records (EHR) systems. A recent modification to Stage 1 requirements following the provision’s original comment period simplifies the process by requiring first year reporting to be accomplished simply by attestation, minimizing its impact on daily operations.
Even before this change, Stage 1’s financial and operational benefits outweighed the potential costs and grunt work needed for implementation.
Working with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)-certified vendors, medical practices can earn incentive payments of as much as $44,000 per provider over the next five years when implementing certified technology by 2012. Again, time is of the essence.
Non hospital-based institutions that incorporate this technology will reap this highest possible financial incentive. Those waiting until 2013 or 2014 to achieve meaningful use status will receive lower rewards, while those who fail to comply by 2015 will face penalties in the form of reimbursement reductions.
The penalties aren’t small. Practices that fail to achieve meaningful use by 2015 will have their CMS collections penalized by 1% that year. The penalty escalates to 2% in 2016, and 3% the following year, and up to a maximum of 5% by 2019.
Early meaningful use IT adopters will avoid these financial hits, and will have made their decision not only for the financial benefits, but also because of anticipated overall operational improvements and patient outcomes. By using a software vendor that offers a certified complete EHR, practices can integrate and quickly achieve certification through the use of a single program rather than through a variety of modules.
For maximum Stage 1 success from an operational standpoint, practices should engage each individual employee impacted by its implementation, from the physician to front-desk and business-office employees. This should be done to ensure how to best incorporate meaningful use into daily workflow. What may work well for one department or employee may wreak havoc on another, undermining or preventing the very benefits that meaningful use technology is intended to deliver.
Vendor partners that offer the ability to capture multiple data points for each patient will enable practitioners to more quickly, and less expensively—both with respect to time and dollars—attain the financial, operational, safety and outcome benefits that meaningful use provides before Stages 2 and 3 begin addressing additional information exchange capabilities and an improvement in the U.S. population’s overall health.
