The Department of Health and Human Services has chosen 12 states and communities to take part in a Medicare demonstration project that will increase reimbursements to participating doctors who use e-health records.
The project will begin this year in four of the areas and next year in the remainder. The first four will be Louisiana, Maryland and Washington, D.C., the Pittsburgh area and South Dakota, including adjoining areas of Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.
The other chosen areas are Alabama, Delaware, a multi-county area around Jacksonville, Fla., Georgia, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia and a multi-county area around Madison, Wisc.
“They’re going to help us transform health care,” HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a press conference.
In each area, up to 200 small to medium-sized primary care physician practices will be recruited. Half will be given incentives for their use of EHRs in treating patients, and the other will be a control group with no incentives.
Each individual doctor who receives incentives could receive as much as $58,000 over the course of the five-year project. A single practice group of doctors could receive as much as $290,000.
In the first year, the doctor or group will receive incentive payments just for using EHRs. They will get more money for using more of the functions and capabilities of the EHRs.
In the second year, they will have to report on their compliance with standard measures of the quality of care. For the remaining three years, they will have to use the EHRs to meet the quality standards.
The EHRs must be certified by the Certification Commission for Health IT, an organization that tests software for compliance with interoperability, functionality and security standards.
The project is designed to determine whether incentives can get doctors in small and medium-sized practices to increase their use of EHRs. This group is the least likely to begin using the technology.
Leavitt said the participating areas were chosen from among 30 applicants. The degree of collaboration among stakeholders such as doctors, insurers, employers, government and consumers was a key criterion for selection, he said, along with demonstrated ability to recruit doctors to take part.
In a news release, Leavitt and Kerry Weems, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said they hoped some of the communities that were not selected will consider starting their own incentive programs.
The cost to CMS if the maximum amount of incentives is paid out will be about $150 million, Leavitt said. He said HHS considers the project “budget-neutral,” meaning that its cost will be minimal in the end.
The demonstration has been praised by many in the health IT community, who say it could create a solid base of EHR users who could persuade their peers to follow their lead.
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.
