HHS advisory panel recommends delaying Stage 2 Meaningful Use until 2014
The HIT Policy Committee, which advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in the Department of Health and Human Services, voted 12-5 to approve a significant delay in requiring providers to meet Stage 2 Meaningful Use until 2014. If finalized by CMS, such delay would be a welcome relief to those providers who qualified for Stage 1 Meaningful Use in 2011 (and therefore would have only a few months to commence Stage 2 Meaningful Use under the current rule).
The delay is among the stage 2 recommendations that the Health IT Policy Committee approved at its meeting June 8 by an overwhelming vote of 12 to 5.
The original 2013 timeframe does not give vendors enough time to design, develop, and test new functionality and providers to deploy it and report measures for one year, said Dr. Paul Tang, vice chair of the Health IT Policy Committee and chair of its meaningful use work group.
“The only group that would be affected is the early entrants who qualify for stage 1 in 2011 who get put into a bit of predicament in an unintended way,” he said. Tang is also chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
As a result, stage 1 demonstration and attestation would continue through 2013; stage 2 would start in 2014 and stage 3 in 2015. With the revised timing, providers will still receive the same payments as originally planned. Instead of 2013, however, early entrants will have to wait to attest and receive payments for stage 2 in 2014.
You can find and download the Meaningful Use workgroup's recommendations by clicking here.
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.
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