Meaningful Use Stage Three to Continue Even As the Agency Moves to Implement MACRA’s Value-Based Payment Law
Alert pathologists and clinical laboratory
executives may have picked up on the conflicting statements about the
future plans for Meaningful Use that have been made in recent weeks by
certain officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Because thousands of hospitals and hundreds of thousands of physicians have made substantial capital investments in electronic health records to qualify for federal incentives, any major change to the Meaningful Use requirements will have broad consequences.
Medical laboratories have a big stake in this issue as well, since
they must invest substantial money into creating the interfaces needed
to connect their labs’ laboratory information systems (LIS) to the EHRs of client hospitals and physicians.
CMS Drops Bombshell at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
The first significant discussion about major changes to the Meaningful Use program came on January 12, 2016. That’s when CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt, MBA, made the surprise announcement during a speech to the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
“Now that we effectively have technology into virtually every place
[health]care is provided, we are now in the process of ending meaningful
use and moving to a new regime culminating with the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2015
(MACRA) implementation,” declared Slavitt to a surprised audience. “The
meaningful use program as it has existed will effectively be over and
replaced with something better.”
During his presentation, Slavitt indicated that three
provider-reporting programs will be sunset and aligned into a single new
program, but he said details of the next stage would not emerge for
several months.
Andy
Slavitt, MBA, Acting Administrator at the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services, surprised physicians and healthcare executives when
he announced on Jan. 12 that the meaningful use program, which had
rewarded providers for demonstrating their use of electronic health
records, would be phased out this year. “The Meaningful Use program as
it has existed will now be effectively over and replaced with something
better,” he said. (Photo copyright: Politico.)
1. The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS); and,
2. Alternative payment models (APMs) by January 2019.
Slavitt described the MACRA legislation as a “major item squarely on our punch list [at CMS].”
“The stakes for this program are high,” he told the audience. “As any
physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are
real. Programs that are designed to improve often distract. Done poorly,
measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the
cynicism that the people who build these programs just don’t get it.”
CMS Gave No Warning MU Was Ending
Given the content of Slavitt’s announcement, reaction to his
statements about the impending end to the Meaningful Use program as it
now exists caused a big stir among healthcare executives tasked with
handling information technologies at their hospitals or physician
practices.
Apparently officials at CMS noticed the reaction generated by Slavitt’s presentation at the J.P. Morgan 34th Annual Healthcare Conference. About one week later, a blog post titled, “EHR Incentive Programs: Where We Go Next”
was published by CMS on its website. The blog’s authors were Andy
Slavitt and Karen DeSalvo, the National Coordinator at CMS. It was a
message to the healthcare industry that, in fact, Meaningful Use was to
continue. What was changing was that Meaningful Use—the measurement of
certified EHR technology by providers—would be managed by CMS in a
manner that is consistent with the requirements of the Medicare Access
and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) that Congress passed in 2015.
In a related story about CMS’ new direction for Meaningful Use titled, “CMS, ONC: Transition to MACRA Will Not Mean the Elimination of MU, EHR Incentives,”
FierceEMR wrote, “The Meaningful Use incentive program is
transitioning, but it’s not over, and electronic health record
incentives are here to stay, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid
Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT
clarified on Tuesday [January 19, 2015].”
In their blog comments, Slavitt and DeSalvo also emphasized that CMS
is bound, under current law, to continue forward with measuring provider
use of EHRs, as required by the Meaningful Use rules.
They noted that Stage Three MU would continue. Meanwhile, the agency is
moving forward to implement the requirements of MACRA, they said.
Further, the CMS officials noted that the agency had heard the
comments and complaints by hospitals and physicians about the burdensome
aspect of using EHRs and attempting to comply with the Stage Three
Meaningful Use requirements. They wrote, “The approach to meaningful use
under MACRA won’t happen overnight. Our goal in communicating our
principles now is to give everyone time to plan for what’s next and to
continue to give us input. We encourage you to look for the MACRA
regulations this year; in the meantime, our existing
regulations—including meaningful use stage three—are still in effect.”
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