Your EHR vendor delivered on stage 1 of Meaningful Use but can your EHR vendor meet the new requirements for ICD-10 and what if your vendor isn’t Meaningful Use Stage 2 certified. What to do then?

Providers are required to demonstrate meaningful use for a three month EHR reporting period. Will it still be possible if you change your vendor? Everyone remember the amount of effort it took to implement the Meaningful Use Stage 1. There isn’t a single practice or hospital or physician that hasn’t mentioned that they are not facing any kind of issues regarding meeting the Meaningful Use requirements or upgrading their EHR system.

According to Centers for Medicare & Medicare (CMS), at the end of January 2014 around 89% of eligible hospitals and 79% of Medicaid eligible professionals had received their EHR incentive payments.

Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use focus on information exchange, practices and providers should be able to prescribe electronically, allow transmission of patient care results and summaries and integrate the lab results. Apart from all this providers need to report on clinical quality measures (CQMs) to CMS.

What if providers are still unable to do this? CMS at the beginning of March 2014 announced update to their hardship exception application for eligible professionals and hospitals. In addition to the existing reasons for the Meaningful Use Extension another reason that professionals can now mention is “2014 EHR Vendor Issues”.

When things get hard then it is necessary to recall the reasons why the Meaningful Use was implemented in the first place. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act goal is to improve the way healthcare is delivered by investing in health IT. The way through which we can achieve large change is by creating significant guidelines and following them.

On the bright side things started looking positive as use of EHRs has led to increase in quality of patient care and financial efficiencies:

  • Researchers at University of California, Davis are working at developing an algorithm that can forecast the beginning of sepsis leading cause of death in US
  • Due to Meaningful Use Program, Jails are also adopting EHRs that allows them to treat health issues regarding the inmates in a better way.
  • In a study by Weill Cornell Medical College it was revealed that by use of Health Information Exchange (HIE), there were 30 % lesser hospital admissions thus saving the hospital approximately $357,000.

Adopting EHR and reaping the benefits of it will take time. You should brainstorm and find possibilities for financial support. So everyone needs to be patient and to stay on the course.