incentive funding-hospitals

So today I will talk about incentive funding. This was one of the main reasons I went into the EMR area-I wanted to learn more about the requirements involved with meaningful use and EMR.In this blog I will focus on incentive funding and hospitals. The next blog will be about incentive funding and physician owned clinics. Following ares some articles I looked up: http://www.practicefusion.com/pages/healthcare_stimulus_center.html http://www.practicefusion.com/pages/HITECH.html http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/TEC-254762/CMS-EMR-Incentive-Funding-Reaches-73-Million.html http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/11/23/bisa1123.htm First, some background. The American recovery and investment act, aka the stimulus bill of 2008, has a provision called the HITECH act. This Act allows the Center for Medicare and Medcaid services to issue annual payments to providers who demonstrate meaningful use of a certified electronic medical system. Meaningful use has 15 criteria that must be met.

At my hospital, I saw a glance of the incentive funding. For my part I went around the hospital and obtained CME usernames/passwords for NP providers and obtained signatures for attestations to meaningful use. All providers, because they worked in our hospital used meaningful use because the criteria was built into our system. In the hospital, providers were shocked that someone else was doing the paperwork for them, but they also wanted to be able to use the money toward areas they thought were needed. The money went into the hospital fund it was distributed individually based on specific providers.There was a lot of holding on the phone for passwords/usernames, but otherwise the process from my point of view did not seem painful. But I was not working with making sure we fit the proper percentages. The resources of the hospital made it a lot easier as opposed to the physician owned clinics we will talk about in the next blog. "Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, hospitals participating in the Medicare program can qualify for up to $2 million in base incentive pay per year for implementing EMR systems. Plus, they can get additional incentive money under a complicated formula that includes $200 per discharge, multiplied by the hospital's Medicare Share and a transition factor that starts at 1.0 and declines to 0.25 over the course of the program. But to qualify, hospitals must meet three basic requirements: They must use a certified or qualified EMR; they must use the EMR to do quality reporting; and they must exchange data with affiliated physicians. To qualify for the highest eligible amount, hospitals must be meaningful users of EMRs by fiscal 2011." (http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/11/23/bisa1123.htm)