Louisiana hopes to become one of a dozen communities picked for a new pilot project from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services designed to provide incentives to small group health care practices to adopt health information technology to measure health care quality.
The grant project, which will take place over five years, provides incentives and bonuses to Medicare and Medicaid practices that adopt electronic health record technology to improve health care quality. Communities that can get 200 physician practices (made up of three to five physicians each) to commit to adopting EHR systems are eligible to participate in the project. Applications are due in May.
“The hope is that this will give concrete motivation to practices that may have been thinking about implementing an EHR system but didn’t feel like they could make the financial stretch necessary to do that,” said Shannon Robshaw, executive director at the Louisiana Health Care Quality Foundation (HCQF).
The HCQF, a nonprofit organization that was recently certified as a Charter Value Exchange by the Health and Human Services Department, will coordinate Louisiana’s effort to be part of the CMS project.
The $58 million CMS pilot project will provide bonuses of up to $58,000 per physician over five years and up to $290,000 per practice that use their implemented EHR systems and achieve high scores on quality measures.
“If physicians get these financial incentives from CMS and if we can get other stakeholders in the state to do the same thing, it might be the tipping point we need to get a larger-scale adoption of EHR,” Robshaw said.
In fact, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently included in his proposed budget another $3.5 million in financial incentives for physician practices that use EHR software. This appropriation, if passed by the legislature, is contingent on Louisiana being chosen as a participant in the CMS project.
Health information technology has been a key concern for Louisiana’s health care industry since Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, when physicians struggled to provide adequate care to victims because they lacked access to patient records.
Gov. Jindal, a former head of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, is an enthusiastic champion of HIT and EHR initiatives. In addition to the aforementioned financial incentives, his new budget also calls for investing $11.1 million in the existing Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange and $4 million in the ongoing development of the statewide Louisiana Health Information Exchange.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
