Hospitals

With legislative activity burgeoning at the state level and a comprehensive bill introduced in the last session of Congress, telehealth advocates believe they have momentum to push for inclusion.

The Federal Health IT Policy Committee has been working for months on developing measures and objectives for Stage 3 Meaningful Use and in November they shared those thoughts with the wider health IT community of stakeholders for input. Recently, CHIME submitted a response to the HIT Policy Committee, urging caution about the assumed pace and practicality of those Stage 3 measures.

On Jan. 14, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) submitted formal comments to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), in response to the release of the Health IT Policy Committee’s proposal for Stage 3 of meaningful use.

Stage 2 of meaningful use raises the bar in terms of how and when hospitals and physician groups must make patient data available.

According to a report from the federal Government Accountability Organization (GAO), acute care hospitals were 1.7 times more likely and children's hospitals were 1.6 times more likely to have been awarded a Medicaid EHR incentive payment for 2011, when compared to critical access hospitals. The report compared the various hospitals that have received meaningful use payments in 2011, finding overall 1,964 hospitals and 45,962 professionals were awarded a total of approximately $2.7 billion in Medicaid EHR incentive payments for 2011.