EHR: Congress Moves to Delay and Modify Timeline for Meaningful Use

There is a growing movement in Congress to push the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to postpone Stage 3 of the electronic health record meaningful use program. Recently, Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) introduced a bill (HR 3309) that would delay federal rulemaking for Stage 3 of the meaningful use program until 2017 or when certain conditions are met. Under the proposed Stage 3 rule, eligible providers would have the option of applying for the incentives in 2017 and would have to attest to meeting the criteria in 2018. The comment period on the proposed rule ended May 29, and the CMS is expected to finalize it soon.

During a hearing on meaningful use Stage 3, interoperability and patient access to data, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) stated: “To put it bluntly, physicians and hospitals have said to me that they are literally terrified of the next implementation stage … because of the complexity and because of the fines that will be levied,” Fierce Health IT writes.

Industry and Medicine’s Response

As reported in Medscape, industry’s response to the Stage 3 proposal has been mainly negative. The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), for example, said that Stage 3 should not be finalized until more providers had participated in Stage 2. As of May 2015, just 50,983 eligible professionals and 1461 eligible hospitals had attested in Stage 2, according to the CMS. The MGMA also wants CMS to eliminate Stage 3 objectives that require patient engagement.

The American Medical Association (AMA) also criticized the proposal, saying more time is needed to evaluate the impact of the first two stages and that the Stage 3 criteria were too ambitious. And both the American Hospital Association and the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME) said the CMS should not finalize Stage 3 until it had had more experience with Stage 2.

It comes as no surprise the AMA strongly supports Congressional intervention to delay Stage 3. “The AMA thanks Rep. Ellmers for sharing our deep concern with a Meaningful Use program that continues to move ahead without first fixing barriers faced by physicians, hospitals, vendors and patients,” said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. “Under Rep. Ellmers’ leadership, federal regulations would be revised to provide greater flexibility for physicians to meet the Meaningful Use requirements and ensure that Stage 3 of the program is developed in step with other efforts to modernize our nation’s health care system.”

The bill also addresses key interoperability challenges by ensuring EHR systems are capable of sending, receiving, and seamlessly incorporating patient data.

“This important bill addresses many of the fundamental shortcomings in government regulations that have made many EHR systems very difficult to use,” said Dr. Stack. “We heard loud and clear from physicians at the AMA’s first-ever town hall meeting on EHRs and the Meaningful Use program that the systems they use are cumbersome, poorly designed and unable to ‘talk’ to each other thereby preventing necessary transmission of patient medical information.”

Struggling to Adopt

Physicians are struggling, as noted in a recent AMA report. One physician the article profiled is in his fourth year of meaningful use, and said the program has slowed down productivity in his practice by about 25-30 percent.

“There are so many more things that you have to report on that I don’t think really add to patient care,” the doctor said. “I’m trying to work with it. I think meaningful use is not necessarily a bad thing. But I don’t think [patients] have an idea what we’re going through. To give them a copy of their note, it’s not just printing it … there are four or five steps just to give somebody a copy of their note.”

The government has known about the problems cited by physicians for a long time. Back in May 2014, CMS delayed for a year the compliance date by which certain early participants in the program meet Stage 2 requirements. The relatively high percentage of providers—62%—still stuck on Stage 1 in the fourth full year of the program bears out the wisdom of the CMS’ Stage 2 compliance extension.

The latest data tracks with an analysis done earlier this year by the American Academy of Family Physicians, according to Dr. Steven Waldren, director of the AAFP’s Alliance for eHealth Innovation. Waldren said the number of family physicians who attested to meaningful use in 2014 fell nearly 40% to about 23,500 practitioners compared with 2013. Physicians specializing in internal medicine experienced a similar drop-off, he said.

Additionally, a new study from Weill Cornell Medical College describes the emergence of “systematic differences” between physicians who participated in the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs and those who did not. That “could lead to disparities in patient care,” according to Weill Cornell researchers, who examined 26,368 physicians across New York State, using payment data from 2011 to 2012, the first two years of meaningful use.

Conclusion

This issue raises serious questions for broader federal health care goals. As we previously wrote, HHS aims to tie 30 percent of payments to quality, including the use of electronic records, by the end of 2016, and 50 percent by the end of 2018. The new MACRA legislation and recent CMS Medicare proposed rules operate as if meaningful use is moving forward as scheduled. Should Congress delay implementation of the next stage of meaningful use, it could have a ripple effect across HHS goals, possibly causing added confusion for physicians and hospitals. It will be important to monitor this as it develops; legislation may need to be passed soon, as CMS wishes to finalize its Stage 3 meaningful use regulations.