Dive Brief:
- CMS has announced that Meaningful Use programs for Medicare and Medicaid EMR use have paid out just under $17 billion in incentive payments so far.
- More than 430,000 eligible hospitals and professionals have achieved some form of Meaningful Use compliance; 93% of eligible hospitals and 80% of eligible professionals have registered for the MU program.
- More than 236,000 Medicare-eligible physicians and 139,000 Medicaid-eilgible physicians have attested to date -- and more than 4,600 or 85% of all eligible hospitals.
Dive Insight:
Though the level of providers having attested to and been paid for Meaningful Use is high, we're still talking Stage 1 here. Providers are just revving up to attest to Stage 2 compliance, which should prove a lot more demanding. It will be interesting to see whether physicians, in particular -- with far less IT resources than hospitals -- hang on all the way through MU Stage 3 and beyond.