EHR Incentive Program Gaining Ground

Substantial momentum is building in the EHR Incentive Program as more and more states begin accepting registration and more providers and hospitals begin attesting to meaningful use. Robert Tagalicod, the new director of CMS Office of e-Health Standards and Services, and Elizabeth Holland, CMS director of health IT initiatives group, updated the HIT Policy Committee on August 3, 2011. The audio and slide deck from that portion of the meeting are below:

Meaningful Use Analysis

The report was given with the repeated caveat that these are preliminary results that should not be used to draw conclusions for policy making. However, there was some discussion of the report and as you heard above, Dr. Neil Calman, a policy committee member and CEO of the Institute for Family Health in New York, said "Once you have the capability of doing something in your system, people tend to do it much more than the thresholds we’ve set. So once you start doing e-prescribing, you can do it for everybody. I wouldn’t be surprised if these high levels are maintained as people qualify."

A new feature of the report was that the medical specialties associated with the eligible physicians and other professionals were separated. The two top specialties are family practice and internal medicine, with Cardiology a distant third place (see page 2 of report below). Twenty-one states have launched their Medicaid EHR program, with Arizona, Connecticut, Rhode Island and West Virginia in the past month according to the report. The CMS EHR Medicaid program also announced the addition of two new states that are now accepting provider registration, New Mexico and Wisconsin. These additions bring the total number of states participating in the Medicaid EHR program to 23.

The full report from CMS is below:

2011 July EHR Monthly Report