Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Why isn't Amazing Charts certified with Medicare?

Help!! We were applying for PQRS money from Medicare but were told we couldn't qualify because Amazing Charts wasn't one of the EHRs certified by Medicare. I thought that if AC was certified for Meaningful Use it was accepted across the board with CMS. The Meaningful Use Wizard even allows you to search for Medicare quality measures. What can Amazing Charts do to clear this up? Like everyone else, we could really use the extra incentive money. thx/Donna

You were told wrong. AC is fine to use to meet all the criteria for both Meaningful Use and PQRS incentives. An EHR is required for either eRx or MU (you can't get both), but PQRS can be satisfied simply by adding a "G code" to Medicare billing.

You may be referring to reporting from within the EHR. Beginning with the 2010 Physician Quality Reporting System program year, eyou can report a PQRS incentive through the EHR-based reporting method. Not every EHR can do this. But you can certainly get the incentive $$$ the usual way.

Not according to CMS. We had them on the phone and were told that in order to get PQRS money via EHR reporting, the EHR had to be certified by them in order to qualify. Why hasn't Amazing Charts applied for this? Are they going to? thx

CMS person you spoke to is referring to reporting directly with EHR reporting. This is a new and not very commonly used method.

We received PQRS money for the past 2 years, our last check about a month ago, and never needed EHR reporting. As I said above, it is true that PQRS reporting can't be done directly with AC using the EHR-based method -- only a handful of EHRs can do this. But you can qualify for PQRS in the most common way, by adding the appropriate "G-code" to each Medicare encounter claim.

As John points out, this advice is incorrect. There are basically three ways to get PQRS money. The first is with a registry. This does not require an EMR at all. You submit data to the organization that maintains the registry and they send it to CMS.
The second route does involve direct data output from your EMR that goes to CMS. At this point Amazing Charts is not capable of doing this. The company does have plans to become certified and enable this process, but you cannot currently do so.
The third route is, as John describes, to document G codes on your encounter forms. You do not need a certified EMR to do this.

For what it's worth, we used the registry approach and have collected our incentive for each of the past two years. We found it very easy to do and expect to complete it for 2012 as well.