Weekly roundup: MU debate continues, ICD-10 push
The big news this week centered around the ongoing debates on Meaningful Use and ICD-10.
As the Health & Human Services Department announced that more than half of all doctors and other eligible providers have now received Medicare or Medicaid incentive payments for adopting or meaningfully using EHRs, several organizations have made public their thoughts on the recent Republican senators’ white paper , “Reboot: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT.”
The HIMSS EHR Association asserted that the EHR incentive program should be maintained, saying that “for providers to best leverage health IT towards the aims of Meaningful Use and interoperability, Congress and the administration as well as providers and health IT developers will have to work together closely.”
The association addressed an area of deep concern in the senators’ white paper: interoperability between different EHR systems. The letter noted progress within healthcare organizations to achieve interoperability between systems, and the growing number of health information exchanges.
Meanwhile, the American Hospital Association agreed with the legislators’ concerns about interoperability, privacy and security and the financial burden of the EHR incentive program but advised against putting the brakes on it entirely.
“Any interruption in incentive payments ... would be unfair to those who have made strategic plans and large investments on the policies in place today,” AHA Executive Vice President Rick Pollack wrote in the May 15 letter.
Regarding ICD-10: The American Medical Association has been strongly opposed to the switch but released a report this week advising the industry not to skip ICD-10 and move straight to ICD-11. “Given the even greater complexities and uncertainties with moving directly from ICD-9 to ICD-11, the Board of Trustees believes skipping ICD-10 and moving directly to ICD-11 is fraught with its own pitfalls and therefore, based on current information available, is not recommended,” according to the report.
Meanwhile, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) has created the WEDI ICD-10 State Collaborative Initiative aimed to bring together state collaborative organizations and their members to increase efficiencies and reduce the significant time and costs associated with ICD-10 compliance.
Is the momentum of Meaningful Use and ICD-10 driving the initiatives at your organization? Please share your thoughts.
Beth Walsh
Clinical Innovation + Technology editor
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.