Health IT execs meet to boost e-prescribing

Health and Human Services Department officials looked to spark the adoption of e-prescribing at a conference this week attended by some 1,400 health care professionals and industry representatives.

The meeting, held in Boston and sponsored by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, was put together in six weeks in preparation for the planned launch of the federal e-prescribing incentive program, set for January. Incentive payments for physicians who institute e-prescribing will initially be set at 2 percent.

We need to raise awareness in plenty of time to be ready for Jan. 1 said Kerry Weems, acting CMS administrator. We have a very short period of time to begin and end the education process.

The next milestone in the adoption push will come in November, when CMS plans to publish its final rule regarding incentive payments to providers. That rule will lay out definitive guidelines on what constitutes complete and successful e-prescribing, Weems explained. He said CMS continues to formulate that guidance and will use the conference to obtain feedback as it prepares the final rule.

Barry Straube, CMS chief medical officer, said the rule for qualifying for bonus payments is potentially reachable by many physicians’ offices.  He said the likelihood of qualifying is quite high for those offices obtaining an e-prescribing system.

HHS officials said they believe the bonus payments will provide the financial driver to accelerate adoption. There is a lot of money on the table here, said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt.

Leavitt cited a $1 billion estimate as the dollar value of prescriptions that fall under the Medicare incentive.

Some physicians, however, remain skeptical of e-prescribing. Questioners during a conference session brought up the cost of adoption and the need for tort reform as issues affecting e-prescribing adoption.

Some anecdotal evidence, however, points to increased adoption.

Randy Boldyga, president and chief executive officer of RxNT, an e-prescribing vendor in Annapolis, Md., said 50 doctors implemented his company’s solution during one recent week, about double the usual number of installations. He said the Medicare incentives are playing a role in the increased activity.

CMS to test receiving quality data from electronic health records

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to test its ability to accept selected clinical quality data directly from hospital electronic health record systems as early as July 2010.

CMS said it would seek volunteer hospitals to report stroke, blood clot and emergency department measures of care via EHR systems as part of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update program, which provides higher Medicare payments to hospitals that report quality measures to the agency.

The agency detailed the plans in the Aug. 27 Federal Register in announcing changes to its rule for the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payments Update. The program, a provision of 2003’s Medicare prescription drug legislation, required hospitals by 2010 to report on 42 quality measures to receive additional incentive payments.

Reporting to CMS is generally paper-based or through a mix of manual and automated systems.

Participating hospitals and their vendors will have to be able to transmit clinical EHR data that adhere to interoperability standards, such as cross document sharing, cross community access, clinical data architecture and Health Level 7 version 3, CMS said.

CMS has encouraged hospitals to adopt EHRs that can report quality data directly to a CMS data repository. Ideally, the use of EHR systems would improve the quality of care by providing physicians with pertinent clinical data as they were treating patients.

“The testing of EHR submission is an important and necessary step to establish the ability of EHRs to report clinical quality measures and the capacity of CMS to receive such data,” the agency said in the published interim rule.

The reporting of selected quality measures is also a key provision of the stimulus law. The Health IT Policy Committee, led by Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT, has recommended that quality reporting be a part of the criteria providers must meet to demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health record systems, CMS said.