In an opinion piece for The Hill‘s “Congress Blog,” Jonathan Bush — co-founder, chair and CEO of athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based electronic health records and physician services — writes that the potential of the meaningful use program to improve patient outcomes and reduce health care costs “will only be realized” with the necessary transparency “that’s required to measure whether the money is being used for the purpose Congress intended.”
Under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health records can qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments.
According to Bush, “The government has no way of verifying that the physicians who claim to have met the meaningful use criteria are actually using health information technology in any meaningful way.” He notes that this “could lead to enormous disparities between what physicians and hospitals are able to do with their EHRs and their actual ability to improve patient care” and potentially waste “billions of taxpayer dollars.”
Bush writes, “The government needs to take steps now to ensure that meaningful use is actually meaningful.”
To achieve this end, Bush recommends that CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT “urge EHR vendors to release more performance data so that providers can make informed purchases.” Bush adds that health care “providers and EHR vendors should be required also to submit actual performance data to CMS” to qualify for incentive payments.
In addition, Bush recommends that CMS:
Source: iHealthBeat
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