Integration Incentives within the Practices to move to Electronic Healthcare

In  preparing for the new push for "meaningful use", final rules will be issued on health IT standards, implementation specifications, EHR certification technology, meaningful use, and incentive programs for eligible professionals and hospitals.

Overview:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) authorizes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide reimbursement incentives for eligible professionals and hospitals who are successful in becoming “meaningful users” of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. The Medicare EHR incentive program will provide incentive payments to eligible professionals (EPs), eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAHs) that are meaningful users of certified EHR technology. The Medicaid EHR incentive program will provide incentive payments to eligible professionals and hospitals for efforts to adopt, implement, or upgrade certified EHR technology or for meaningful use in the first year of their participation in the program and for demonstrating meaningful use during each of five subsequent years.

Monies actually allocated for these projects are as listed:
HITECH Funds Allocation


o $18 billion through the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement systems as incentives for hospitals and physicians who are “meaningful users” of EHR systems.
o $2 billion to the Office of the National Coordinator for infrastructure necessary to allow for, and promote, the electronic exchange and use of health information for each individual in the United States; updating the Department of Health & Human Services’ technologies to allow for the electronic flow of information; integrating health IT education into the training of healthcare professionals; and, promoting interoperable clinical data repositories.
o $1 billion to be made available for renovation and repair of health centers and for the acquisition of health IT systems.
o $550 million for – among other things – the purchase of equipment and services including, but not limited to, health IT within Indian Health Service facilities.
o $400 million for comparative effectiveness research on how use of electronic data impacts healthcare treatments and strategies.
o $300 million to support regional and sub-national efforts towards health information exchange.
o $40 million to be used by the Social Security Administration to use EHRs to submit disability claims.

What does this mean for the average physician?

Each physician will run into barriers such as bringing on more staff to implement these systems, workflow development will have to be standardized within the practice, the decision of choosing the right application that has the ability to integrate with other softwares securily, and the ability to report the data they record for measures of quality of care will have a new strain on these physician groups.  Chris Thorman at Software Advice lays that out pretty well on his blog. 

Partnering with a strong IT group will be crucial to the success of the implememntation for these physicians.  The IT group will be able to pull the pieces together: IT devices, HL7 interfaces, using the software efficiently, and having the policies and clinical flows down to give the clinical staff the time to see their patients.

Waiting will not be an option anymore the age of technology has reached the average family physician.  They are now going to started being penalized (dinged) after 2014 if they are not using some sort of CCHIT electronic medical by CMS.  Their only other option will be to stop seeing Medicare patients.  Another discussion for another day....

Layout of Recommendations:

First Stage