SharePhysician Incentives
We have been meeting with government decision makers and industry experts to stay educated about the status and requirements for the ARRA HIT incentives. To date, here are some important facts that you should know:
ARRA currently provides approximately $34 billion in funds allocated for the building of health IT infrastructure and incentives to adopt. The availability and amounts of these incentives are as follows:
- Year 1 (2011) - $18,000/per physician
- Year 2 (2012) - $12,000/per physician
- Year 3 (2013) - $8,000/per physician
- Year 4 (2014) - $4,000/per physician
- Year 5 (2015) - $2,000/per physician
- Penalties for non-adoption start in January 2015, by reductions in their Medicare fee schedule if they are not actively utilizing and reporting with a certified EHR solution.
- Incentive dollars are NOT tied directly to the IT investment; they are directly related to Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements.
The act states that the provider must exhibit “meaningful use” of certified technology to qualify for the above incentives. These guidelines have not been established to date; however, in general, to qualify as such, the system must provide the following functionality:
- Electronic prescribing - Prescription benefit, medication history & routing
- Patient problem lists
- Laboratory orders & results
- Point-of-care reminders - drug-to-drug, drug-to-allergy, drug-to-lab & drug-to-disease
- Visit summaries
- Patient portal - bi-directional communication with patients
- Interoperability using standards
- Reporting quality measures & audit trails
As a provider, the best approach to ensure you are positioned to take advantage of federal incentives, you should begin to make plans to implement a system that, at minimum, meets the above listed functionality. Remember, incentive dollars are NOT tied to the technology investment, but to Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, so a practice should purchase technology based on current practice budgets.
Our Care360 EHR, a component of the Centergy suite of solutions enables a physician to start using technology today.
Our overall goal is to ensure our current and future customers have the right technologies in place, at an affordable price point, to take advantage of any additional funding available.
Contact us today to learn about how Care360 EHR can help you take advantage of the Federal Stimulus incentives outlined in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
MedPlus is the healthcare information technology subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics and Care360™ is a registered trademark of Quest Diagnostics.
