EHR Meaningful Use to End in the year 2016, CMS Leader states

The Meaningful Use program will be ending some period in the year 2016, confirmed Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the (CMS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), on the day of Tuesday. The announcement follows the months of recommendations by healthcare stakeholders that the plan, intended to incentivize the utilization of EHRs, had run its course. In remarks in a West Coast conference, Slavitt accepted.

“Now that we efficaciously have technology in virtually every area where care is given, we are now in the procedure of ending Meaningful Use and moving to a latest regime culminating with the MACRA execution,” Slavitt said during a presentation at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in the state San Francisco. “The meaningful use program as it has survived will effectively be over and replaced with something great and better.”

What “something better” is sustains cloudy. MACRA, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, is legislation that authorized latest payment models for contributors, involving the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).

Slavitt stated that details will roll out during the next numerous months on what will replace Meaningful Use, but it will involve sunsetting multiple provider reporting programs, like Meaningful Use and the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), and aligning them into a latest program.

The objective, which Slavitt has articulated recently and reiterated at the conference, is to shift away from rewarding contributors for use of technology and toward acquiring good patient outcomes, and to let contributors customize their objectives so that technology can construct around individual practice requirements.

Slavitt also needs to level the playing field for start-up companies, involving use of open APIs (application programming interfaces) “to open the physician desktop and permit apps, analytic tools and connected technologies to get information in and out of information systems protectively.”

And he warned the agency, specifically vendors: “We are deadly critical about interoperability.” Better interoperability is essential to close referral loops and engage sufferers in their care, he noted, “and information blockers will not be tolerated.”