Dive Brief:
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is about to put 257,000 providers eligible for the Medicare EHR Incentive Program on notice that they have one last chance to demonstrate Meaningful Use, or their payments will be reduced.
- As required under ARRA, providers who don’t meet the final deadline for Meaningful Use compliance will see their reimbursements cut from 1% to 5%, CMS noted on its Web site.
- Those receiving notices will have until the end of the December to submit their attestation applications. If they do submit successfully, they can prevent payment reductions for 2014 noncompliance with MU.
Dive Insight:
The rubber is meeting the road, regardless of whether eligible providers even understand what is going on. Those eligible providers that haven't yet attested for MU this year are just about out of luck. By this point, it seems likely that for some practices, even taking a 5% Medicare reimbursement cut seemed better than redesigning how they run their businesses.
While some larger medical practices sailed through, for others the complexity of the Meaningful Use program made the US tax code look like cooking instructions for a cup of ramen noodles. The AHA was right to push to move the previous deadline of November 30 back a month to December 31, but for many providers, that 30 days won't make much difference.
But it's that same old chestnut—the government's objectives are honorable and reasonable, but its methods border on the byzantine. As a result, the amount of good that will come from this program may be offset significantly by the way the program is being managed. The Meaningful Use concept may have been a good idea, but that idea deserves an upgrade. More carrot and less stick, perhaps?