The good news is, there are no set appropriations for how much the federal government can spend on rewarding providers who adopt and use electronic health records (EHRs) under the Medicare and Medicaid meaningful use EHR incentive program, according to National Coordinator for Health IT, Farzad Mostashari, MD. The bad news is only a fraction of physicians have received the payment.
"Whoever qualifies, gets paid; there's no hard cap," said Mostashari, who gave a keynote at the Annual Policy Summit for the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) on Wednesday.
Reports differ on how many physicians embrace EHRS or are using them effectively. In August, the American Medical Association reported that more than half the physicians in the U.S. have adopted EHRs but only 11 percent have received the financial incentives.
But reports show in that same month that Medicare and Medicaid EHR payments are approaching $7 billion since the program's beginning, with $6.9 billion paid out to 143,800 physicians and hospitals in total program estimates through the end of August.
Mostashari said the federal government estimates it will pay out around $20 billion in incentives before the program shifts to a penalty in 2015, but there is no fixed budget set in the HITECH Act that mandated the program. The government recently announced it has paid out nearly $7 billion since the program began in 2011.
Would the program be cut off if a different President takes office? It would be hard to picture Congress cutting or capping the program after doctors and hospitals have made major investments in health IT "on the good word of Congress," Mostashari added.
The program has come a long way, the health executive said, noting that, two years ago,
patient information wasn't organized in a way that could combine diagnoses, medications codes and lab reports in the same record. But, “The industry came together with a consensus and pilots and working groups, which resulted in the meaningful use Stage 2 rule,” Mostashari said. “We're light years ahead of where we could possibly have been in Stage 1,” he added.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
