35% of Medicare Eligible Professionals Failed to Meet Meaningful Use

Starting January 2015, roughly 257,000 Medicare eligible professionals will be hit with a 1 percent penalty to their Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. The penalty is a direct result of failing to meet Meaningful Use by Oct. 1, 2014. CMS will begin mailing letters this week informing these healthcare providers of the penalty. Instructions regarding the penalty will be posted to CMS website.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported the percentage of all “office-based physicians” accepting Medicare patients hasn’t changed significantly between 2005 and 2013. It is estimated that 735,041 Medicare eligible professionals currently accept Medicare patients. If you divide the number of Medicare eligible professionals into the total number of Medicare eligible professionals currently accepting Medicare patients you find that roughly 35% of these providers will be penalized for failing to meet meaningful use by Oct. 1, 2014. If you take into account that only 60-70% of providers have implemented EHR technology then the percentage of failure is even higher.

Thomas J. Bierster, Jr., CEO for MD Logic, stated "the vast majority of these providers failed to invest the time required to find an EHR company that would deliver speed, increase efficiency and guarantee Meaningful Use. As the leader in high performance EHR solutions, MD Logic offers both the speed and expertise in helping our customers achieve their goals. If a doctor failed to meet Meaningful Use it is due to that doctor investing in a non-productive EHR. Unfortunately the EHR market is littered with slow, cumbersome “non-productive” EHR systems. Physicians are under the false impression that just because a company achieved Meaningful Use Stage II that the software is efficient. Certification has nothing to do with efficiency. This is very unfortunate and gives physicians a false sense of security when investing in an EHR system.

“Hospital EHR systems have proven to be the most rigid and non-productive systems in the market for healthcare professionals. In most cases, hospitals are hiring staff to follow the doctors around and enter the required meaningful use data in an effort to meet Meaningful Use requirements and earn incentives dollars. These hospital systems are way too cumbersome to allow a doctor to document real time while treating patients.”

To learn more about how your clinic can implement the latest EHR technology, increase efficiency and maximize profitability, please contact our corporate headquarters today at 800-273-7750.