Home Forums Discussions Meaningful Use CMS to Shorten 2015 Reporting period to 3 months

Yes, just like last year, there is a movement afoot to shorten the MU reporting period to just 3 months this year. It has quite a bit of traction, with the deputy administrator for innovation and quality and the chief medical officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services writing a blog post about the change..

Take a look here: http://blog.cms.gov/2015/01/29/cms-intends-to-modify-requirements-for-meaningful-use/

Seems that this is more than just talk, and we should be seeing an official rule change soon.

Has anyone heard an update on the 2015 reporting period being shortened?

It has been proposed, but they will not decide until this summer.
Here is a description.
"CMS will accept public feedback on the proposed rule during a 60-day comment period. A draft final rule could be issued as soon as this summer"

Which is kind of absurd. In the meantime, if you plan to attest, you need to meet the criteria all year; until the year is 2/3 done and they say, "nope, you only need 90 days".

It is absurd and it seems like they keep making the meaningful use requirements so difficult so that you don't pass therefore they don't have to pay you the incentive money and can also take the percentage away from you for not qualifying.
I have no idea how to get 5% of patients to send us messages on the portal, most of them don't have emails and those that do don't even want a portal set up. I just read a comment on a blog that said if someone can hack into Blue Cross and Target and all these big companies that you know have big time IT security why would patients willingly want their medical records online.
Also we only have one local lab housed in a clinic that we have an interface with and most patients won't go there, there is no way we can pass the structured lab data measure.

If you are still trying to do MU
Keep the faxed labs in a separate folder. Lab non interface
Otherwise it counts against you for MU scoring

The issue on MU is that the patients that it applies to are Medicaid and Medicare.

1)In general, Medicaid patients either don't have access to computers and the internet (except,perhaps, their smart phone) or really don't want to be bothered with it. People in that low socio-economic group tend to either not have these resources, or don't understand them.

2) Medicare patients are generally elderly, did not have access to computers through most of their lifetimes. So they won't use it either.

Now, before someone jumps up and says they have some Medicaid/Medicare that do....

Well, so do we! But in general, this is the way it goes. The MA programs in NYC tend to pull from the Medicaid population, and they actually had to have an intro to computers class in the programs.

So yes, it's going to be hard to satisfy the MU requirements that depend on the patient using the systems. Too bad they couldn't give money based on commercial patients. We get flooded with messages.

If we order the labs in amazing charts but they don't come back through the interface doesn't that count against us?

The lab interface in AC in not bidirectional. You cannot order labs through it. You can make orders in it instructing someone to order labs.

That is what I meant, creating and printing the order in AC. When you do that the number populates in Core 1 for number of lab orders created using CPOE. Then in Core 10 the numerator is from the number of labs that come back into AC as structured data and denominator is the number of labs that have been created in AC, correct? I'm trying to clarify this because we only have a small number of people that will use the lab that we have the only interface with, so I'm thinking those that will utilize other labs we should not be creating the order in AC so it won't count against us when it doesn't come back in as structured data? Or am I missing a step? We have ordered numerous labs but only 9% have come back in as structured data so we are failing that measure.

FUBAR, sorry not helpful just my view