Strategically placed during National Health IT Week, 17 healthcare organizations sent a letter to HHS requesting that the meaningful use reporting period for 2015 be adjusted from 365 days to 90 days. Along with that, the Flex-IT act was introduced to congress in order to legislate this change. It’s always hard to predict what congress will do, but many believe that the Flex-IT act will get tagged on to something else and get passed. We’ll see if that indeed happens.
What everyone I talk to agrees is that the 365 day meaningful use stage 2 reporting period is going to be impossible for hospitals to meet. Sure, a few hospitals might make some herculean effort and meet it, but they’ll be so few and far between that they’ll be a rounding error.
What would it mean to healthcare and meaningful use if almost every hospital opts out of the meaningful use program? This isn’t too hard to imagine. A large portion of the meaningful use money has already been spent and the penalties don’t look that bad when you consider the costs and risks associated with the all or nothing meaningful use program.
If the MU reporting period doesn’t change, I think it spells the death of meaningful use. Sure, the program will subsist for those who have attested, but it will be a defunct program with so few participants that the program will have little impact. Plus, we’ll see a wave of efforts to make sure that those penalties for not being meaningful users of an EHR are removed much like has been done with the SGR fix year after year.
The Flex-IT act would at least keep meaningful use on life support. MU 2 is much harder, but with a change to a 90 day reporting period many will do it to avoid the penalties and get the last bit of EHR incentive money. If we want meaningful use to survive, then the Flex-IT act (or something that does something similar) is going to be essential to its future.
I’m just personally not sure that the Flex-IT act is such a great thing for EHR or the industry. Is it better to keep meaningful use on life support or bite the bullet now and have meaningful use die on the vine.
One might argue that meaningful use has accomplished it’s main goal: adoption of EHR software. It’s dramatically accelerated the adoption of EHR software. Would it be such a bad thing for meaningful use to disappear now? With MU gone, we could return to a more rationale EHR market. I guess this is where I’m torn on whether getting the Flex-IT act passed is a good or a bad idea.
What do you think? Is the Flex-IT act a good idea or should we just fall on the sword now as opposed to prolonging the regulation?
EHRs are not an end in themselves. For many practices, as anecdotal reports have shown, the adoption of EHRs over paper was a step backward. Interoperability and related benefits (such as analytics) could make the billions spent on EHRs worth something.