The US Health and Human Services (HHS) Department announced policy changes this week designed to encourage the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by physicians and hospitals. HHS says eligible professionals that meet the Meaningful Use Stage 1 requirements this year will now have until 2014 to meet the EHR Incentives Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements, extending the original deadline by one year. Eligible professionals who attest to Stage 1 requirements in 2012 would not need to meet Stage 2 requirements until 2014, but they would still qualify for the same total incentive payments.

The changes come as a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds that 52 percent of office-based physicians in the US intend to take advantage of the incentive payments available through the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. The survey shows that the percentage of physicians who have adopted EHRs in their practice doubled from 17 to 34 percent between 2008 and 2011, with the percentage of primary care physicians using this technology nearly doubling from 20 to 39 percent.

To learn more about meaningful use, please visit the NCMS HIT Resource Center at: https://www.compassionatecarenc.org/practice_management/hit/why.html#mu.

The NCMS Foundation’s PractEssentials Program can assist you with EHR adoption. Please contact Terri Gonzalez ([email protected]) or Franklin Walker ([email protected]), or call 800-722-1350.

For more information about PractEssentials and Practice Management Services offered by the NCMS Foundation, see: http://www.ncmsfoundation.org/programs/practicemanagement/.

For more information and a fact sheet about the HHS announcement, please visit: http://www.healthit.gov/.

For more information about the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, see http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms.

For more information on the 2011 CDC survey referenced above, see http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/surveys.htm.