Prepare now for Stage 2 Meaningful Use while doing Stage 1  

Category: Practice Management

In a recent CMS report it was indicated that physicians who received meaningful use incentives in stage 1 had left the toughest work for the next stage of the federal program.

About 251,000 physicians and other eligible professionals already have received more than $2.6 billion in payments for the first stage of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' electronic health records incentive program. Collecting for stage 2 will rely on two things that, by and large, physicians have so far skipped: getting patients to look at their paperless records and exchanging data with others.

Data made available by CMS at an October virtual briefing hosted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society show that objectives related to those two tasks were the most commonly deferred in stage 1. In that stage, physicians had to prove, or attest, that they could meet at lea...