More than half of all doctors and other eligible providers have received Medicare or Medicaid incentive payments for adopting or meaningfully using electronic health records (EHRs).
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey in 2012, the percent of physicians using an advanced EHR system was just 17 percent in 2008. Today, more than 50 percent of eligible professionals (mostly physicians) have demonstrated meaningful use and received an incentive payment. For hospitals, just nine percent had adopted EHRs in 2008, but today, more than 80 percent have demonstrated meaningful use of EHRs.
More than 291,000 eligible professionals and 3,800 eligible hospitals have received incentive payments from the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, as of April.
“We have reached a tipping point in adoption of electronic health records,” said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “More than half of eligible professionals and 80 percent of eligible hospitals have adopted these systems, which are critical to modernizing our health care system. Health IT helps providers better coordinate care, which can improve patients’ health and save money at the same time.”
Doctors, hospitals, and other eligible providers that adopt and use certified electronic health records receive incentive payments through the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. Those programs are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which provide incentive payment to eligible health care professionals and hospitals that “adopt, implement, upgrade or demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology.”
The health IT programs began in 2011 and is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
Health IT systems give doctors, hospitals, and other providers the ability to better coordinate care and reduce errors and re-admissions that can cost more money and leave patients less healthy. Adoption of EHRs is also critical to the broader health care improvement efforts that have started as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
According to Dave Kirby, president of Kirby Management Consulting and project manager for the North Carolina TeleHealth Network (NCTN), health care providers over the last few years have made their regular activities (such as examining patients) highly dependent on use of EHRs, Health Information Exchanges, telemedicine, and other forms of health IT.
“This still-growing trend has made health care provision much more dependent on broadband networks that interconnect sites of care with each other and with key data centers that house health IT data and applications,” said Kirby.
The NCTN, led by the Cabarrus Health Alliance, has broad health care community involvement and funding support from the FCC. Its mission is to assure that non-profit and public health care in North Carolina have a statewide high-speed broadband network at affordable costs. The project is designed to assure that this growing dependence on HER technologies is match by a reliable broadband network.
MCNC, as part of its mission to support the broadband needs of community institutions in North Carolina, acts as the NCTN’s integrator for broadband services. These services provisioned on the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) has been in operation since early 2011.
A new FCC program, the Healthcare Connect Fund, assures NCTN subscribers of continued funding availability as well as a wider set of eligible sites. NCTN leaders are now pursuing the enlargement of the network to take advantage of this new program.
These efforts – improving care coordination, reducing duplicative tests and procedures, and rewarding hospitals for keeping patients healthier – all are being made possible by reliable broadband connectivity and widespread use of EHRs. And, the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government will start penalizing providers in 2015 that haven’t begun using EHRs in reimbursements they get for treating patients.
