CMS Releases Meaningful Use Changes in Interim Final Rule with Comment
CMS has announced the release of an Interim Final Rule with Comment (“IFC”) that makes several changes to the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs and 2014 EHR Certification Criteria.
Short and sweet, the IFC major changes that are proposed include:
- Revising regulatory text for the hospital measures for making patient information available online. The measure will base the denominator on all unique patients, not all patients. CMS inadvertently omitted the word “unique” from previous regulatory text for these measures.
- Expanding denominator options for the objective of sending electronic lab results to ambulatory providers. Hospitals may choose between a denominator of all lab orders received from ambulatory providers or all lab orders received electronically from ambulatory providers, in order to account for the difficult hospitals may have where they receive a small percentage of lab orders electronically and to capture performance more adequately.
- Moving the CQM minimum denominator threshold effective date from 2014 to 2013.
- Adoption of new version of the DEC (version 1.1) to ensure EHR technology certified is capable of electronic capturing of all data for CQM calculation and submission.
- Adoption of November 2012 balloted version of QRDA III for appropriate creation of data files for transmission of CQM data.
- Intent to address technical errors in CQM specifications released previously on October 25, 2012.
The IFC can be found here. Stay tuned for more information about the comment period!
