MU Reboot Legislation

Archived OEMR Non Profit Organization
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tmccormi wrote on Friday, July 15, 2016:

Posted on July 14, 2016 I Written By John Lynn

John Thune has introduced a new legislation called the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Regulatory Relief Act (S. 3173) to provide some relief to hospitals and eligible providers participating in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program (Better known as Meaningful Use). You can find the legislative text (ie. legalese) and the summary document (ie. readable).

This legislation was written by the “REBOOT members” John Thune (S.D.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Richard Burr (N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.) who previously released a white paper on their Health IT concerns.

Here’s a short summary of what the legislation would do:

Codify the 90-day reporting period for meaningful use
Remove the All-or-Nothing approach to Meaningful Use and set a 70% threshold
Increased flexibility in Hardship Exceptions
If I’m reading the legalese right, it also opens the door for the HHS Secretary to allow a 90 day reporting period for MIPS as well. It’s interesting that it wasn’t highlighted in the summary document.

Regardless, these are all changes that will be welcomed by the healthcare community. What I like most about these proposals is that I don’t think any of them will impact how a hospital or doctor was previously planning to use their EHR. At least it won’t impact care in any sort of adverse way. Doctors will still be using an EHR. However, it will provide some reporting relief and will open the door of meaningful use to organizations that wouldn’t have been able to comply previously. Of course, I’m sure there are a few people out there that will settle for nothing less than a repeal of meaningful use completely. I predict that such a thing will never happen.

What do you think of this proposed legislation? Are they enough? Should they be providing more relief? Will this change your meaningful use plans?

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tmccormi wrote on Friday, July 15, 2016:

On a related note:

At a hearing on MACRA yesterday by the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) said the agency may consider a delay in implementing MACRA, acknowledging that small and rural practices may struggle with the new legislation and its current January 1, 2017 start date.

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tmccormi wrote on Friday, July 15, 2016:

And this …

ONC has come up with two core measures which address not only the comments, but also its own analysis and MACRA’s specific definitions of “widespread interoperability.”

Measure #1: Proportion of healthcare providers electronically engaging in the following core domains of interoperable exchange of health information: sending; receiving; finding (querying); and integrating information received outside sources.
Measure #2: Proportion of healthcare providers who report using information electronically received through outside providers and sources for clinical decision-making.

To measure these activities, ONC expects to be able to draw on existing national surveys of hospitals and office-based physicians. These include the American Hospital Association’s AHA Information Technology Supplement Survey and the CDC National Center for Health Statistics’ annual National Electronic Health Record Survey of office-based physicians.

The reasons ONC would like to use these data sources include that they are not limited to Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive program participants, and that both surveys have relatively high response rates.