Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

CMS projects that by the end of this year, 30 percent of Medicare payments will be linked to quality of care rather than the quantity of procedures performed — and that transition will impact every aspect of your payments, including your electronic health records (EHRs). To that end, the agency is overhauling the EHR incentive program that you’ve gotten to know since CMS debuted it in 2009.

“We have been working side by side with physician organizations and have listened to the needs and concerns of many about how we can make improvements that will allow technology to best support clinicians and their patients,” said CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt and Karen DeSalvo, MD, National Coordinator for Health IT in a Jan. 19 announcement.

CMS is currently working under four principles that will guide the EHR transition, as follows, Slavitt and DeSalvo noted:

• Rewarding providers for outcomes that they can achieve with patients via technology;
• Giving practices the flexibility to customize their health IT systems to their needs;
• Offering more avenues to access electronic health information, such as apps and plug-ins;
• Creating national interoperability standards to ensure data flows appropriately.

CMS intends to work closely with the provider community as the agency further fine-tunes the upcoming EHR transition. To read more about the program, visit http://blog.cms.gov/2016/01/19/ehr-incentive-programs-where-we-go-next/.