MU participants, payments continue to climb

The number of eligible providers (EPs) and hospitals registered for the Meaningful Use program and receiving incentive payments continues to creep up, according to the latest report provided at the Aug. 7 Health IT Policy Committee meeting.

Jennifer King, research and evaluation branch chief for the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT, said there are 405,000 active registrations for the program out of 533,000 providers. Twelve percent of the total population of Medicaid providers are meaningful users. As of the end of June, $15.5 billion was paid in incentives; 310,000 providers have received a payment.

More than 75 percent of EPs are registered for the program, said Robert Anthony, health insurance specialist in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Office of E-Health Standards and Services, and now, 58 percent of all EPs have received a payment through the program. Sixty-one percent of all Medicare EPs who are meaningful users are non-primary care providers. To date, about one out of every two Medicaid EPs are meaningful users of EHRs. About 68 percent of all Medicaid EPs have received an EHR incentive payment.

In July, 7,425 payments were made, but Anthony pointed out that July has traditionally been the slowest month of the year and expects to see a spike next year from January to March.

Just over two-thirds (64 percent) of hospitals have attested for MU, King said, and 17 percent have received an AIU payment but not yet attested. That means that 71 percent of U.S. hospital beds are at hospitals that already have attested to MU.

There has been a strong decline in the percentage of hospitals that have not yet engaged and that figure is getting closer to zero for all categories, King said.