About 44,000 apply for MU hardship exception
About 44,000 healthcare providers submitted hardship exemption applications for Meaningful Use (MU) before the July 1 deadline, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The information comes after reports that a technical glitch was preventing providers from meeting MU deadlines, setting them up for inappropriate penalties.
According to recent reports, CMS will not be able to register until mid-October whether providers with new EHR systems can meet MU requirements. Therefore, providers who adopted EHR systems for the first time this year likely will not have their reports registered by the Oct. 1 deadline. Meanwhile, CMS will withhold 1 percent of Medicare payments for 2015 for providers who miss the deadline.
Lawmakers and stakeholders have called on CMS to fix the glitch.
CMS has said that providers had sufficient warning to attest to MU by the deadline and could have avoided the penalties if they had filed for hardship exemptions. The agency estimated that only a few providers were affected by technical glitch.
According to CMS, most of the hardship exception applicants were providers new to MU and were unable to adopt an EHR system certified under the latest federal standards.
CMS said it would notify providers individually if they have been granted a hardship exemption but did not say how many exemptions would be granted.
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.