Dive Brief:

• A new bill being considered in Congress would give hospitals that fell behind on Meaningful Use a chance to become eligible for incentive payments again and allow them to duck cuts in their Medicare reimbursement.
• As things stand, hospitals past their first year of Meaningful Use were required to be using 2014 Edition-certified electronic health record technology by October 1 of this year, the beginning of the 2015 Meaningful Use year. Under current regs, those that didn't "are simply out of luck," notes writer Jim Tate.
• The new bill, however, would remove the requirement that hospitals must have met the October 1 deadline to claim Medicare and Medicaid incentives. And it would switch the MU reporting period back to a three-month quarter, which is where things stood under the first year of Meaningful Use.

Dive Insight:

So how likely is it that hospitals will enjoy MU relief? Blogger Jim Tate, a highly-regarded expert in this area, argues that the odds are "greater than 50%" given that the bill already has 19 cosponsors. (The original sponsor was Congresswoman Renee Elmers, a North Carolina Republican.) Tate predicts that this MU measure will be snuggled inside of a larger appropriation bill and passed, largely without comment—which, as he notes, is how the ICD-10 delay got passed.

If the bill passes, this should be quite a Christmas present for hospitals, which have been lobbying hard for relief from the October 1 requirement. Not only do they fear giving up very substantial incentive payments, but also seeing a cut to Medicare reimbursement. Though the Medicare reimbursement reduction is only a few percentage points, it could still be quite painful for some hospitals operating on very slim margins and or in the red. 

Hospitals still need to get their Meaningful Use act together, however. CMS, and most of Congress, clearly expect them to keep up with EMR requirements, and health leaders will need to see to it that they do.