Worried About MU Audits? Don’t Do These Things

No matter how careful your hospital is in documenting your Meaningful Use compliance, there’s always a chance you’ll get audited.  And when you’re audited, it’s important to be prepared.

CMS is planning to audit 5 percent of participants in the Meaningful Use program, so while it’s not a dead certainty that you’ll be audited, it’s certainly a significant risk.

One way to be prepared is to know what not to do when you’re going through a Meaningful  Use audit. According to EMR Advocate‘s Jim Tate, here’s six “worst practices” to avoid when you’re under this particular gun:

  1. No one in charge: Assign a committee to be responsible for the audit process and requests for documentation. When things go wrong there will be plenty of people to blame.
  2. Insufficient documentation: Just assume you can always go back and recreate reports that you can’t find. All that data is in there somewhere, I’m sure we can find it if we need to.
  3. Ignore requirements: We are not really sure what is this “syndromic surveillance submission” business. We only have to do one test? Let’s just say “yes” and move on.
  4. Undocumented MU strategy: What was the reasoning behind those core measures that were excluded and menu measures that were not chosen? Who was that staff member that made the decisions?
  5. Blame the EHR vendor: This entire mess was created by our vendor. It is their job to make sure there are no problems. They should be responsible and make this go away.
  6. Don’t perform a Security Risk Assessment: I’m pretty sure we did one of these a few years back and it was OK. Probably still good now.

What these worst practices  have in common is that they all involve letting critical steps in the documentation and management process drop like a stone. Hospitals which make these mistakes aren’t managing Meaningful Use compliance, they’re crossing their fingers and hoping that everything works out.

What Tate’s comments make clear is that without a carefully organized, thorough, step-wise approach to complying with Meaningful Use, hospitals will present a bunch of red flags to a Meaningful Use auditor.

It seems to me that any hospital can do Meaningful Use right if it tries. The question is whether senior executives take the threat of an audit seriously enough to allocate time and energy to seeing that everything is in order with Meaningful  Use compliance.  Hospital readers, are your facilities doing a good job with this?

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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