The Bush administration and leading Senate Democrats appear to have found something on which they can agree: an e-prescribing requirement for doctors in exchange for their avoiding a reduction in Medicare payments.
At a Capitol Hill press conference today, a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) announced the introduction of a bill that would give doctors permanent Medicare fee bonuses for acquiring and using e-prescribing systems.
The legislation, which House lawmakers were also introducing, would give doctors a deadline to start writing their Medicare outpatient prescriptions electronically. If they are not doing so by Jan. 1, 2011, they would face cuts in their Medicare reimbursements.
Kerry said at the press conference that the bill already was somewhat moot because “we’re very confident that the Senate Medicare package is going to include a version of this proposal.”
That package, which the Senate Finance Committee is preparing, would block a 10 percent Medicare pay cut for doctors due to take effect Jan. 1. Because of the press of time, the bill could be approved quickly before Congress leaves Washington for its holiday break.
A day earlier, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt wrote to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the Finance Committee's chairman, encouraging the committee to require doctors to adopt certified health IT as a condition of escaping the fee cut. “Physicians who do not adopt appropriate, available technology should receive a lower payment than those who do,” Leavitt’s letter states.
It adds that the Bush administration supports Leavitt on the Medicare payment letter, which has other recommendations relating to Medicare funding.
Kerry said Baucus and the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican member, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, are committed to an e-prescribing requirement, although the details of the requirement in their Medicare bill were not yet final.
Consumers Union and former House speaker Newt Gingrich also support the bill Kerry and Ensign proposed. “We think this is one of the best presents the Congress could give the country this winter,” said William Vaughan, senior policy analyst at Consumers Union.
Asked about the cost of the e-prescribing bill, Kerry said it was not known because the details still were being worked out. However, he said the net cost to Medicare, after the cost-reducing benefits of e-prescribing were taken into account, should be nil.
“It’s going to have a good positive impact on the federal budget,” said Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), another supporter at the press conference. Most of the savings would come from avoiding medication errors that make people sicker or even kill them, although other savings could come from avoiding duplicate prescriptions for the same patient and additional prescribing of generic drugs rather than more expensive proprietary ones.
The Kerry-Ensign bill also would give Medicare doctors bonuses of between $1,000 and $2,000 -- depending on when they began e-prescribing -- for adopting the technology. It would also authorize HHS to grant hardship waivers for doctors who face unusual difficulties in implementing e-prescribing.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
