Senators request flexibility in meaningful use compliance

张琨

Senators request flexibility in meaningful use compliance By Mary Mosquera
Thursday, April 01, 2010

A group of 37 Democratic senators yesterday asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to revise the proposed meaningful use plan so that providers could have more flexibility in meeting the deadlines for satisfying some of the criteria for the financial incentives.  
In a letter, the senators, led by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), asked HHS to allow providers to  “temporarily defer a limited set of IT goals” without otherwise changing the ultimate timeline or requirements of the program.
“While we believe that the general implementation framework outlined in the proposed (meaningful use) rule should be preserved, starting with a phased, flexible approach to meaningful use would be a constructive change,” according to the letter.
“By allowing doctors and hospitals to temporarily defer a limited set of health IT goals, we can improve the guidelines HHS has set in way that will encourage widespread use of basic, functional IT tools and improve patient care,” Baucus said.
Senators also sought modifications to the use of Medicare provider numbers to identify hospitals for the purpose of receiving incentive payments. Sometimes a single number can encompass multiple campuses, the letter noted. “Therefore a hospital system with multiple provider numbers will be eligible for more incentive payments than would be a hospital system of equal size with a single provider number.”
The letter asked HHS to consider ways of clarifying how those hospitals are accounted for. The senators also wanted HHS to make a “technical correction” that would make “outpatient physicians practicing adjacent to hospitals” eligible to receive HIT incentives.
This letter follows another sent earlier this month by a bipartisan group of 27 senators to Charlene Frizzera, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, seeking similar changes. The earlier March 2 letter also requested “a longer transition that recognizes a practical, incremental approach to HER adoption that rewards the efforts already underway in America’s hospitals.”
“Very few hospitals have yet been able to accomplish” the 23 objectives or requirements to demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records, according to the senators who signed the letter, including Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Additionally, the senators said that critical access hospitals, those with 25 acute care beds or less, should be eligible to receive Medicaid program incentive payments if they meet the requirements for meaningful use.