On Tuesday evening, what at first appeared to be the long-hoped-for flexibility in attesting to Meaningful Use Stage 2 was proposed by CMS.
Since I am no expert on the program — which was complex to begin with and gets ever more so with every attempt to inject flexibility — I will refer to a statement from CHIME to describe exactly what may take place:
“According to the proposed rule, Eligible Professionals, Eligible Hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals will be allowed to use 2011 Edition Certified EHR Technology (CEHRT), 2014 Edition CEHRT or a combination of the two Editions to meet Meaningful Use requirements in 2014. Because providers are at various Stages and are scheduled to meet different Stage requirements in 2014, CMS and ONC also have proposed giving providers the option of meeting Stage 1 requirements or Stage 2 requirements.”
Now, while what may transpire as a result of the proposal is significant, what I find more interesting is why it was put forth in the first place. And that becomes clear when one looks at a presentation delivered on May 6 by Elisabeth Myers of the Office of E-Health Standards and Services at CMS, during which she revealed that, as of May 1, only four hospitals had attested to Stage 2. Yes, that’s right, four.
When I would listen to the HIT Policy Committee Meetings, I often heard the word “aspirational” used in relation to the goals. Well, I guess they aspiration-ed 99.9 percent of hospitals right out of the program. In fact, earlier this year, one of the HIT Policy Committee’s own members said his organization was not going to attest to MU2 by the deadline.
“We don’t feel confident we can attest in 2014 and maintain our current level of patient safety,” Marc Probst, CIO at Intermountain Healthcare told HealthLeaders Media during HIMSS.
I thought it was a brave and wise decision. And while few others have made such public statements, I think it safe to infer they have followed suit. The silence, as they say, is deafening.
But not everyone agrees. Some, such as Sean Nolan, Microsoft HealthVault general manager, think it’s much ado about nothing. He recently Tweeted: “Amazing how whiny ppl are about “burden” of MU requirements. Seriously? Too bad, govt will likely cave. Sorry patients!” — 1:23 PM – 13 May 2014 Sean Nolan @familyhealthguy
Well, depending on how you see the proposal, the government did “cave,” but that would have made little difference to the final tally. Nobody was coming to the party. Though the jury is still out on whether the latest proposal from CMS does more harm than good, it seems to have at least attempted to do right thing — both for hospitals and patients.
flpoggio says
Sounds like Sean Nolan and MS is calling the kettle black. How many hundreds of millions have they squandered trying to build a health care product and fell flat on their face?? Anyone counting?
But to their credit they haven’t complained about it…but then what’s a hundred million when you have a cash balance in the billions???
The only reason he made that self serving comment is because the more complex the regs get the more in trenched big companies like MS get. When MS starts operating on the same small margins that hospitals do, and responds to the same volume/complexity of regulations, then they can start throwing stones.
Frank Poggio
The Kelzon Group