To clearly address the meaningful use dropout rate and ensure the ongoing success of meaningful use, the government must reduce the program’s complexity.
My last EMR Straight Talk post, which addressed the alarming 17% meaningful use dropout rate, generated many comments and resulted in several subsequent media interviews. While CMS has acknowledged the facts regarding this program failure, it does not acknowledge the gravity of the implications for the future of the program. According to a Bloomberg News article, CMS attributes the fallout to many of the same reasons that I have identified from the outset—program complexity, lack of fit with specialty practices, cost, dissatisfaction with EHRs, and inability to meet the meaningful use requirements.
To evaluate the program’s future, it is necessary to understand why physicians participate in meaningful use to begin with, and what their motivation would be to continue to participate once they have purchased a certified EHR and recouped $18,000 of its cost. A simple financial analysis begs the question: Why would physicians do dramatically more work for significantly less money?
One only has to look at the math to predict the future. As the table below illustrates, the financial value of the incentives drops by a factor of 10 at the same time that the program requirements increase precipitously. If 17% of physicians abandoned the program when the incentives fell from $6,000 to $1,000 per month of meaningful use effort, what should we realistically expect to happen when the incentives drop even further and the complexity increases?
Total $ Value of Participating in the EHR Incentive Program
*Estimate based on annual Medicare revenue of $300,000. Penalty = 1% in 2015, 2% in 2016
I am certainly not saying that physicians are only motivated by money—of course they want to do the right thing and provide the best possible care for their patients. And shunning meaningful use does not preclude them from leveraging their certified EHRs to exchange clinical data with other providers. But physicians have been quite outspoken about their concerns from the beginning, expressing their perception of the program as overly burdensome, wasteful, and distracting from their mission to provide that care. Now, the evidence is in—they are not just speaking, but they are walking. Clearly, to ensure the ongoing success of meaningful use, the government must fundamentally reduce the program’s complexity.
Evan Steele is the CEO of EHR company SRSsoft and EMR Straight Talk where he writes about his observations and opinions on the countless complexities that are challenging everyone in the health care industry where this was first posted.
