Highs and lows for Meaningful Use

As discussion rages on about specifics of objectives for Stage 3 Meaningful Use and whether the program should even continue on its current timeline, Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, announced that he will leave his position this fall.

This changing of the guard comes at a crucial time—the Health Policy Committee discussed many possible changes to proposed objectives for Stage 3 during its most recent meeting. Several associations and Senators, however, have called for a slowdown of the program in recent months.

The number of eligible providers (EPs) and hospitals registered for the Meaningful Use program and receiving incentive payments continues to creep up. Speaking 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.

Despite these growing numbers, many critical access hospitals and other small hospitals are at risk of not achieving Meaningful Use and face the coming associated Medicare payment penalties beginning in 2015.

According to a study from Mathematica Policy Research and the American Hospital Association, published in Health Affairs, with fewer than half of all hospitals having a basic EHR in 2012, smaller and rural hospitals “appear to be less likely than other hospitals to have met the Stage 1 criteria, and very few hospitals had all of the computerized systems necessary to achieve Stage 2 Meaningful Use.”

Between 2011 and 2012, the percentage of hospitals with at least 200 beds receiving Meaningful Use payments more than doubled, but those with less than 100 beds had a lower rate. Teaching hospitals also had a higher Meaningful Use success rate than non-teaching hospitals. The proportion of critical access hospitals that received a Meaningful Use payment in 2012 declined slightly from the previous year.

“Without the full participation of these hospitals, the nation will not be able to achieve the larger policy goal of sharing data across providers and ensuring that clinical information follows patients wherever they receive care,” the study said.

What do you think of the pace of the Meaningful Use program and who might become the next national coordinator for health IT? Please share your thoughts.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor