Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said today he expects the e-prescribing incentives and penalties in the Medicare bill passed this month to “have a profound effect on the adoption and use of e-prescribing.”
Although President Bush vetoed the bill, Congress overrode the veto, and Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said at a news conference that the administration supports the bill’s e-prescribing provisions and will work to implement them.
Leavitt said CMS will hold a conference sometime this fall on e-prescribing to give doctors an opportunity to air any concerns they might have about the administration’s program.
Experts say fewer than 10 percent of doctors use e-prescribing, but the administration wants to increase that percentage. Weems said the technology could save CMS $156 million in five years.
E-prescribing also has advantages for doctors, patients, pharmacists and those who pay for drug benefits outside Medicare. Dr. James King, a family physician in Tennessee and president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said at the news conference that e-prescribing “definitely improved the care that I provide to my patients.”
However, he acknowledged that he does not always submit prescriptions electronically for a variety of reasons, such as knowing that particular pharmacies do not accept e-prescriptions and the inability to prescribe controlled substances under Drug Enforcement Administration rules.
Under the Medicare bill, doctors who use e-prescribing for Medicare patients will receive a 2 percent bonus in 2009 and 2010, a 1 percent bonus the following two years, and a 0.5 percent bonus in 2013.
Those who don’t use e-prescribing will be subject to fee reductions of 1 percent in 2012, 1.5 percent in 2013 and 2 percent thereafter. There is a provision for hardship exemptions.
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.
