AMA ‘alarmed’ by low MU attestation rate

While federal officials are touting the high “retention rates” of hospitals in Meaningful Use (MU), the nation’s largest physician organization remains highly critical of the entire direction of the program.

“The American Medical Association (AMA) is alarmed by [Tuesday’s] announcement that more than three quarters of eligible professionals have still been unable to attest to Meaningful Use,” the group said in a terse press release headlined “AMA: Meaningful Use is Still Broken.”

At a Tuesday meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) representative said that 36,782 “eligible professionals”—physicians, dentists, chiropractors, podiatrists and optometrists—had attested to MU Stage 2 and 91,033 had reached Stage 1 as of Feb. 1. Any provider who had not achieved MU by the end of 2014 is subject to reduced Medicare payments this year.

“The program’s one-size-fits-all approach, that has not been proven to improve quality, has made it difficult for physicians to take part. The penalties physicians are facing as a result of the Meaningful Use program undermine the program’s goals and take valuable resources away from physician practices that could be spent investing in better and additional technologies and moving to alternative models of care that could improve quality and lower costs,” the AMA said. 

“They additionally make it harder for physicians to meet Meaningful Use in the future. In order to successfully attest, physicians must spend tens of thousands of dollars for tech support, software upgrades, interfaces and data exchange, often on a recurring basis.”

The AMA in September spelled out eight areas in which EHR design and usability should be improved.

A month later, the Chicago-based organization released a “blueprint” document calling for certain changes to MU. Recommendations include adding flexibility to the rules, aligning quality measures with other Medicare and Medicaid programs and reorienting EHR certification around interoperability.

In November, the AMA formally adopted a policy calling for the federal government to do away with the MU penalties completely.

Then, last month, the AMA was the lead signatory to a letter to national health IT coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, asking for major changes to EHR certification.

“Among physicians there are documented challenges and growing frustration with the way EHRs are performing. Many physicians find these systems cumbersome, do not meet their workflow needs, decrease efficiency and have limited, if any, interoperability. Most importantly, certified EHR technology (CEHRT) can present safety concerns for patients. We believe there is an urgent need to change the current certification program to better align end-to-end testing to focus on EHR usability, interoperability, and safety,” the letter said.