Meaningful Use Rules Released

A summary of the new “meaningful use” rule was published online Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Department of Health and Human Services has released its final rule on “meaningful use” of electronic health records with the goal of making it easier for physicians to comply.

“We want these objectives to be ambitious but achievable,” David Blumenthal, MD, MPP, the department’s National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said at a press conference on Tuesday announcing the release of the final rules. “So we added some choice.”

As part of the Recovery Act, the federal government will be offering financial incentives beginning in 2011 to physicians and hospitals that make “meaningful use” of electronic health records — $44,000 to physicians who see Medicare patients and $63,000 to physicians who see Medicaid patients. The proposed rule, issued on Dec. 30, 2009, explained what criteria needed to be met to constitute “meaningful use.”

But critics objected that the proposed rule was too hard for physicians to comply with and would not give them enough incentive to buy an electronic health record (EHR) system.

In order to make things more flexible in the final rule, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — which was in charge of writing the regulations — reduced the number of core requirements physicians and hospitals must meet during the first two years of EHR implementation, Blumenthal said.

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