By Ashish Jha, MD

Yesterday’s New York Times headline read that “Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records.”  The story describes an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, released November 29, 2012, that faults the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for not providing adequate oversight of the Meaningful Use incentive program. Going after “waste, fraud, and abuse” always makes good headlines, but in this case, the story is not so simple.

For those not intimately familiar with the CMS policy, in 2009, Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.  The program, administered through CMS and state Medicaid programs, created financial incentives for doctors (and other eligible professionals) and hospitals to adopt and “meaningfully use” a certified electronic health record (EHR).  To receive financial incentives, which began to be paid in May 2011, doctors and hospitals “attest” that they have met the meaningful use requirements, providing an affirmation for which they are held legally accountable.

The process works as follows: health care providers visit a CMS website, register, and enter data demonstrating that their EHRs are “certified” and that they met each of the individual requirements for meaningful use. Then they attest that that all the data they entered is true.  For example, a physician might have to report, to meet just one of the 20 meaningful use measures, how many prescriptions she wrote over the past 90 days, and how many she wrote electronically.  My conversations with colleagues suggest that it can take a lot of time for providers to gather all the data they need to “attest” to meeting Meaningful Use.  Then, CMS runs logic checks to ensure that the numbers entered make sense and, if there are no errors, they cut the provider a check. Through September, 2012, CMS paid out about $4 billion in incentives to 82,000 professionals and more than 1,400 hospitals.

Continue reading “Trust But Verify: Why CMS Got It Right on EHR Oversight”