Only 12% Of Docs Meet Meaningful Use Rules

Just over 12% of about 509,000 eligible physicians said they met requirements for meaningful use incentives for electronic health records (EHRs), early study results show. Less than 10% of specialists and 17.8% of primary care providers attested to enough meaningful use to receive incentive payments through Medicare and Medicaid as of May 2012, according to a letter published in the Feb. 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Although these data suggest rapid growth in the number of providers achieving meaningful use, this pace must accelerate for most eligible professionals to avoid penalties in 2015," Adam Wright, PhD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues wrote...

..."Successive stages of meaningful use increase in difficulty, and it is not yet clear how many eligible professionals will successfully attest in these later stages," the authors said. "The downstream effects of meaningful use on quality, safety, and efficiency are not yet known, and further increases in EHR adoption, functionality for clinical decision support systems, and research are needed to ensure the effectiveness of the meaningful use program."

The authors' data paint a much harsher picture of EHR use than a December report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, which found that 27% of office-based physicians had an EHR system capable of supporting 13 of the Stage 1 core objectives for meaningful use...