By Jim Tate – Most of us have gotten pretty used to the Meaningful Use (MU) audits being conducted by Figliozzi & Company. They are the folks that have been conducting the CMS EHR Incentive audits for both eligible hospitals (EH) and professionals (EP) involved in the Medicare or dually-eligible Medicare/Medicaid EHR incentive programs.
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By Jim Tate – Lost in the furor and excitement of the recently released Proposed Stage 3 MU Rule something slipped by us. Robert Frost would say it “came on little cat feet”. John Lennon would say it came in “like a lizard on a window pane”. What is it that crept in through the cracks in the floor and why should we care?
By Jim Tate – “Things don’t change until they do.” I think Albert Einstein said that. Maybe it was Cat Stevens, I’m not really sure. We go along in our merry little lives content with the knowledge that the sun will come up tomorrow and summer will follow spring. All the rules that we rely on help us make sense of a chaotic universe.
By Jim Tate – What a difference a few weeks can make. Earlier this month I wrote a post entitled: When It Rains It Pours: A New Trend In Meaningful Use Audits? The topic was a disturbing new trend in meaningful use audits. At EMR Advocate we had been working with a hospital system to validate their meaningful use attestations by a series of mock audits.
By Jim Tate – What is would be like to open your inbox and find 33 separate CMS EHR Incentive audits? That is the exact experience one of our client hospitals experienced several week ago.
By Jim Tate – I can’t help it. Whenever I hear the term “patient engagement” I think about sumo wrestling. I’m not sure why but maybe it is that I associate “engage” with combat. You know, “engage the enemy”. 2015 is set to be the “Year of Patient Engagement” in most people’s book.
By Jim Tate – The transition for Eligible Hospitals (EH) from Stage 1 to Stage 2 Meaningful Use (MU) certainly has challenges. Six months ago I had imagined that patient engagement requirements would be the troublemaker. After all, getting patients to come to the hospital patient portal was a whole new ball of wax.
The Meaningful Use (MU) dice are rolling and tumbling right now and they just might come up “box cars” (double sixes). The odds are starting to look good for a reprieve for those eligible providers who are hoping to get a roll back on the full year requirements for MU in 2015. I put the odds at greater than 50%.
It sounds fairly simple and straight forward. Medicaid and Medicare eligible professionals (EP) who have achieved and attested to meaningful use (MU) can assign their incentive payment to another entity. CMS lays it right out there “However, under Medicare, eligible professionals (EPs) may choose to assign their incentive payments to their employer or entity with which the EP has a contractual arrangement.