The CMS EHR Incentive Program, aka Meaningful Use, is a frequent topic in this blog. The program comes in a couple of flavors. In our experience, the Medicare flavor is the one most nephrologists will choose to pursue. As a reminder, this year’s timeline for the Medicare path looks like this:
- January 3 – Registration opened.
- April 18 – Attestation opened.
- May – The first round of Incentive Payments arrived.
- October 3 – The last day to start a 90-day reporting period for 2011. (I would not wait this long.)
Those of you with young children have perhaps heard this question emanating from the back seat of the car, “Are we there yet?” With a couple of months of the program in the books, so to speak, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at progress to date.
Today there are six ONC-ATCBs that have been authorized by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) to certify electronic health records and other entities for meaningful use. These six entities have been very busy, as there are over 1,000 certified applications available today on the Certified Health IT Product List. Granted many of these are for hospitals and a large number are certified as “modules.” But suffice it to say, those shopping for a certified EHR will not suffer a lack of choice.
What about the program itself? CMS has done a great job of publishing both registration rates as well as payment numbers on its website. On the registration front, as of the end of July, CMS reports that over 62,000 eligible professionals have registered for the Medicare component of the program. During the month of July, approximately 6,800 providers registered. The number of new registrants appears to be declining on a monthly basis. Earlier in the year the registration rate was closer to 10,000 providers per month.
Of additional interest is an accounting of how many folks are being paid for successfully demonstrating meaningful use. As noted above, the first checks for the Medicare flavor of the program went out in May. Examining the Medicare path only, the monthly breakdown of providers paid through July is noted below:
Notice the numbers here are growing as providers across the country increasingly complete their 90-day reporting period for year 1. The total incentive paid to eligible professionals reporting via the Medicare path is just over $18 million through the end of July. CMS reports that almost three times as many eligible professionals have been paid via the Medicaid path through the end of July (3,334 providers have received a total of $70 million). Remember the Medicaid payments started last year and we are likely to see the Medicare number eclipse the Medicaid number before the end of this year. If you add hospitals to the mix, the CMS EHR Incentive Program has paid just under $400 million in incentives through the end of July.
Of additional interest in the July report is the first summary of successful Medicare providers by specialty. Notice nephrology makes the top ten just ahead of hemotology/oncology. I am delighted to see nephrology on this list and thrilled that the majority of these folks are our customers.
In summary, the program is certainly out of the gate. There are a multitude of certified EHRs on the market today. By my count, however, only about 15% of the eligible physicians in the country have registered for the program through the end of July and a very small fraction of those have attested to date.
I suspect the attestation number will grow substantially by year’s end. But whether it reaches the number CMS originally predicted in the publication of the final rule last year remains to be seen. In the final rule, CMS created a low and a high scenario for adoption in an effort to model costs for the program. The low scenario estimated 10% of eligible Medicare professionals would demonstrate meaningful use in 2011. That’s almost 40,000 providers. We may be out of the driveway, but we definitely are not there yet.
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