Short Description:

Step Right Up—Meaningful Use Incentives are Adding Up

Background:

In 2011, the federal government began offering financial rewards for providers to implement electronic health records (EHRs) in caring for their Medicare and Medicaid patients. For eligible doctors, these “meaningful use” incentives could provide you with extra income of up to $44,000 over five years in Medicare incentives and $63,750 in Medicaid incentives over six years.

To qualify for the Medicare program, you need to accept Medicare patients, but there is no minimum number or percentage. You must also spend less than 90% of your time practicing psychiatry in an emergency department or inpatient psych unit. For the Medicaid program, you must have a minimum of 30% Medicaid patients or practice mainly in a federally qualified health center or rural health center and have a minimum of 30% indigent patients.

The incentives have added up. As of May 2014, the government had paid out $23.7 billion in meaningful use incentives to US physicians, according to a report on the website GovernmentHealthIT (http://bit.ly/1oGJnUv).

What do you have to do to get your share of this extra spending money? We wrote about this in our December 2011 issue (http://bit.ly/U5tKwt), but in a nutshell, here’s the scoop:

    
• Use an EHR program “certified” by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Ask your EHR vendor or look at the government’s official list here: http://bit.ly/1pTogwQ.
   
• Use the EHR program in a way defined as “meaningful,” which translates to improving patient care and communication between providers.
   
• Use an EHR system that allows you to maintain an up-to-date problem list/diagnosis (ie, record your patients’ diagnoses); maintain an active medication and allergy list; record your patients’ demographics; use your EHR’s drug interaction and drug allergy checking software; and use electronic prescribing.
   
• Record vital signs (height, weight, and blood pressure) for at least 50% of your patients, information you can obtain from patients’ PCPs.
   
• Record smoking status in at least 50% of all patients 13 or older.
   
• Provide “clinical summaries” (summaries of their diagnoses and treatments) to at least 50% of patients.
   
• Record a number of “clinical quality measures,” most of which you are allowed to ignore unless you are a PCP.