CMS' 5 Questions On Hospital Readiness To Use EHRs For e-Reporting

Certified electronic health records will make it easier for providers to report clinical quality measures for not only meaningful use but other federal programs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to align some of those measures. CMS wants to hear from hospitals and health IT vendors about their readiness to electronically report certain patient data under the agency’s quality reporting program using a standard document format, according to a Dec. 28 CMS request for information in the Federal Register. Comments are due on Jan. 22, 2013.

To be ready, vendors and hospitals would need to be able to meet the criteria for reporting clinical quality measures electronically under the EHR Incentive Program final rule for meaningful use stage 2. CMS wants to reduce the burden and increase the efficiency of collecting and submitting patient-level data on clinical quality measures and is exploring how hospitals might be able to report the data on a subset of the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program using certified EHRs...