Health IT Law Blog : Health IT Law Blog : Post & Schell: Law Firm : HIT & Electronic Health Records

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) opened the registration process for eligible hospitals and professionals hoping to capitalize on the incentive payments provided under the HITECH Act.  Each such hospital or professional needs to register with CMS in order to receive such payments, and CMS encourages all eligible healthcare providers to register as soon as possible.

You can find the EHR Incentives Program registration page by clicking here.

According to Government Health IT, over 4,000 providers have already registered with CMS. Several states have also launched registrations for their Medicaid incentive programs.  Moreover, hospitals in Oklahoma and Kentucky have already begun receiving incentive payments:

Kentucky processed payment to the University of Kentucky Healthcare, the university’s teaching hospital, for $2.86 million. The first payment amounts to one- third of the hospital’s overall expected amount for participating in the program, according to CMS. Oklahoma issued payments to two physicians at the Gastorf Family Clinic of Durant, Okla., for $21,250 each for having adopted certified EHRs.

Besides Kentucky and Oklahoma, registration is available for the Medicaid EHR incentive program in Alaska, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

In February, registration will open in California, Missouri, and North Dakota. Other states will likely launch their Medicaid EHR incentive programs during the spring and summer of 2011.

You can learn more about registration for Medicare incentives for eligible professionals by clicking here; and for Medicaid incentives for eligible professionals by clicking here. A similar CMS guide for both Medicare and Medicaid incentives for eligible hospitals can be found here.

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On July 13, 2010, CMS issued the final rule defining "meaningful use" and establishing the parameters and requirements for eligible professionals, hospitals and other providers to receive incentive payments provided under the HITECH Act for widespread adoption of electronic health records.  According to CMS, the key changes included in the final rule (from the meaningful use NPRM published in the Federal Register on January 13, 2010) include:

• Greater flexibility with respect to eligible professionals and hospitals in meeting and reporting certain objectives for demonstrating meaningful use. The final rule divides the objectives into a “core” group of required objectives and a “menu set” of procedures from which providers may choose any five to defer in 2011-2012. This gives providers latitude to pick their own path toward full EHR implementation and meaningful use.
• An objective of providing condition-specific patient education resources for both EPs and eligible hospitals and the objective of recording advance directives for eligible hospitals, in line with recommendations from the Health Information Technology Policy Committee.
• A definition of a hospital-based EP as one who performs substantially all of his or her services in an inpatient hospital setting or emergency room only, which conforms to the Continuing Extension Act of 2010
• CAHs within the definition of acute care hospital for the purpose of incentive program eligibility under Medicaid.

You can view the PDF of the final rule on Meaningful Use by clicking here.

You can learn more about it from the HHS press release by clicking here.  Also, the New England Journal of Medicine published an excellent summary by Dr. Blumenthal of the changes included in the final rule; you can find this article by clicking here.

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