MEANINGFUL USE

Meaningful Use - Its Requirements, Implications, Challenges and Rewards



Table of Contents

Introduction1

Goals1

Requirement for hospitals2

Requirement for eligible professionals (EPs)2

Implications3

Goal setting3

EHR product3

Implementation4

Usage4

Challenges5

Rewards5

Hospitals5

Eligible Professionals6

Conclusion6

References7

Meaningful Use - Requirements, Implications, Challenges and Rewards

Introduction

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) created an incentive fund. For qualification of these incentives, Meaningful use of health information technology has to be ensured. Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the authority to disburse these incentives to doctors and hospitals who meet the rules and regulations set by ARRA (Jha, 2009). The incentives help in effective deployment of electronic health record (EHR) technology. Hence, the medical professionals and hospitals who manage to deploy it are called “meaningful users”.

Goals

It is important to clear a misconception at this stage of the paper. Some people misunderstand Meaningful Use incentives as aimed at improving information technology. This is not true. In reality, meaningful use aims at improving the administration of healthcare (Jha, 2010). Meaningful Use has the following goals:

To improve the overall quality of patient care

Care coordination improvement

Encourage patients and their families to participate

Overall improvement in public health and population

Health information privacy and security

Meaningful Use does not only cater the individual professionals and hospitals but will also have an impact on the overall industry. In that, hospitals that wish to upgrade themselves by implementing electronic health record technology but have a shortage of funds will be the principal beneficiaries of this.

Requirements

The latest CMS rules as regards qualification for the financial incentives as of 2010 consist of core and additional requirements. For both eligible providers and hospitals, the number of additional requirement is 5. These they can choose from a given list of 10 additional requirements. As far as the core requirements are concerned, 14 and 15 are mandatory for eligible providers and hospitals respectively. The following figure shows meaningful use requirement sets by year (Bartholet, 2010):

Requirement for hospitals

The hospital engaged in the long term care facilities, certain cancer centers, psychiatric hospitals, rehab hospitals and children's hospitals are not eligible for this Meaningful Use incentives payment. Hospitals have to sustain their meaningful use stance for a period of at least 4 years to be able to qualify for the financial incentive. Moreover, the hospital's meaningful use should be for consecutive four years. That is to say, that if a particular hospital qualifies meaningful use in a certain year then, it has to maintain it in the following year because whether it earns a payment or not the year will still be counted as the second payment year (Kumar, 2011).

Requirement for eligible professionals (EPs)

Unlike hospitals, EPs are not eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments. An EP who dedicates 90% of service time to inpatient and emergency department in any hospital is not eligible for Meaningful Use payments. The EP has the leeway to choose any one incentive program. Percentage of service and place of service are two determinant criteria in this ...