By Joseph Conn
Posted: December 6, 2013 – 3:30 pm ET
“The CMS is giving providers another year to show they’ve met the Stage 2 criteria of the federal government’s incentive program to encourage the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. That means the start of the next phase will be pushed back a year.”
Stage 2 will be extended through 2016 and Stage 3 won’t begin until at least fiscal 2017 for hospitals and calendar year 2017 for physicians and other eligible professionals who have by then completed at least two years at Stage 2.The latest extension parallels what the feds did with Stage 1, which was originally set to last two years but was lengthened by a year when it appeared the industry would be overstretched to build and get acclimated to systems capable of meeting the federal payment program’s more stringent Stage 2 criteria.”
“The goal of this change is twofold,” according to a CMS statement from Robert Tagalicod, director of the Office for E-Health Standards and Services at the CMS, and Dr. Jacob Reider, acting head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. First, the statement said, its aim is “to allow CMS and ONC to focus efforts on the successful implementation of the enhanced patient engagement, interoperability and health information exchange requirements in Stage 2.” Second, they said, it’s “to utilize data from Stage 2 participation to information policy decisions for Stage 3.” READ MORE
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