Meaningful Use Dropout Rate At A Staggering 17%

Here’s an alarming fact: the meaningful use dropout rate is already 17%.

A recently published assessment of the government’s April EHR attestation data revealed that 17% of the providers who earned an $18,000 EHR incentive in 2011 did not earn the $12,000 second incentive in 2012. Although the analysis was performed by the venerable Wells Fargo, my immediate response was, “That’s impossible! They must have miscalculated the data.”

So I crunched the numbers for myself, and to my astonishment, the conclusion is absolutely correct. A staggering 17% of the providers who succeeded at demonstrating meaningful use for 90 days were unable to sustain that performance for a full year—the second required reporting period—despite the fact that the program’s requirements remained exactly the same and the providers already had the necessary workflows in place to support those requirements. What makes this fact even more troubling is that the 2011 attesters were typically the early EHR adopters and therefore most experienced in the use of the technology.