CHIME/HIMSS: What is the fate of Beacon communities after Stage 1?

NEW ORLEANS—Communities that have received financial assistance through the federal government’s Beacon Program will cease to receive funding after Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 1, so their fate is “unknown” after 2014 when that is set to expire, according to Judy Murphy, RN, deputy national coordinator for programs and policy at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

The Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program sought to demonstrate how health IT investments and MU of EHR advance patient-centered care. ONC is providing $250 million over three years to 17 selected U.S. communities that have already made inroads in the development of secure and accurate systems of EHR adoption and health information exchange.

However, Murphy acknowledged that the Beacon program was established, by definition, to help transition facilities through the Stage 1 MU process. “They were initially set up to help small practice providers with EHR adoption, and about a year after the launch of the program, we realized that we also needed to put a lot of resources into many different underserved, critical-access rural hospitals.”

In fact, there are 1,700 U.S. critical-access hospitals that have less than 50 beds, and one-third of those facilities do not have broadband. Murphy acknowledged that she found these statistics “surprisingly high.”

To assist with these communities, ONC has been looking at some areas of the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that could potentially assist financially. “These facilities may be considered part of the ACO [accountable care organization] value-based processes, and CMS may be able to roll them into this type of model,” said Murphy. “There are some inter-agency options being assessed,” Murphy said.

However, she added that the Beacon programs are being tasked with creating a sustainability model, similar to the current model for health information exchange. “Conceptually, if these entities create a value for the services they provide, the market will sustain them,” Murphy said. “They shouldn’t go away just because their funding goes away. However, they are expected to sustain themselves after the grant funding runs out.”

Please stay tuned for the May cover story from Clinical Innovation + Technology about the successes and challenges facing the Beacon program communities.