Contributors Press HHS to Restructure MU, Defective Level 3 Rule

On the heels of CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt’s declaration previous week that the Meaningful Use plan as it has existed is efficaciously over, 31 healthcare contributors have sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell depicting their uncertainties with the “present, ineffectual” MU structure.

The organizations—involving Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Emory Healthcare, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, and Weill Cornell Medicine—late previous week asserted HHS to restructure the MU policy to better fit the transition of industry to value-based care and to concentrate on making better the interoperability and usability of EHRs. Particularly, the contributors see the Level 3 final rule as being counterproductive to reaching these objectives.

“The Level 3 final rule, like its predecessor principles, is too concentrated on pass-fail needs and lacks emphasis on results,” claims the Jan. 14 letter to Burwell. “By maintaining this defective structure, we do not consider Stage 3 will reinforce movement towards more innovative care models or boost up the sustained participation. Level 3 also fails to prioritize foundational problems to make better interoperability, which is imperative for our medical communities to function at their greatest levels.”

Moreover, the contributors discuss that Level 2 EHR design needs have been a “fundamental drag on interoperability” and that Level 3 will only serve to worsen these issues.

“By utilizing MU as an enforcement device, there has been little bit improvement in information exchange,” states the healthcare agencies. “Sufferer medical data is also shoehorned into a format that was designed for MU measures, and not in a way that accommodates the requirements of physicians and sufferers. Dealing these problems must be a priority, but what is needed in the Level 3 rule restricts the progress while diverting required resources. Unfortunately, we consider the Level 3 final rule maintains the similar problematic measures in Level 2 and will not put the nation on a way to reach these objectives.”

Although, given Slavitt’s remarks previous week at the J.P. Morgan yearly healthcare conference that the Meaningful Use plan will be ending sometime in the year 2016, the status of Level 3 of the MU plan remains in query. While CMS is in the procedure of ending Meaningful Use and executing the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, involving the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System for contributors, Slavitt compelled that the agency is “deadly serious” over the interoperability.

Healthcare agencies will have to wait to hear what CMS policies to do to foster larger health data exchange. Details are slated for release over the next some months.

For now, Slavitt’s Jan. 11 speech attempted to allay contributors’ uncertainties regarding the logic that the Meaningful Use plan has been the driving factor behind the design of EHR technology, which they claim lacks technical innovations essential for results-based care.

The CMS chief stated that the agency needs to “move away from rewarding contributors for the utilization of technology and towards the result they achieve with their sufferers” while enabling contributors to “customize their objectives so tech companies can construct around the individual practice requirements, not the requirements of the government” so that EHR technology is “user-centered and support physicians, not divert them.”