This is a surface level analysis of healthcare provider level participation in the Meaningful Use (MU) program. The data is publically available from the CMS (https://dashboard.healthit.gov/datadashboard/data/MU_REPORT.csv).
The analysis focuses on:
- market share trends by top EHR vendors
- potential data issues
- trends in NPI providers progressing from Stage 1 to Stage 2 of the program
A quick primer on Meaningful Use:
Meaningful use (MU) defines minimum U.S. government standards for using electronic health records (EHR) and for exchanging patient clinical data between healthcare providers, between healthcare providers and insurers, and between healthcare providers and patients.
A healthcare organization must demonstrate meaningful use in order to be eligible for payments from the federal government under either the Medicare or Medicaid EHR incentive program. Meaningful use attestation is a process that documents that an organization or individual has successfully demonstrated meaningful use and is successfully fulfilling the requirements for EHR and related technology.
Meaningful use is divided into three stages.
- Stage 1 focused on promoting adoption of EHRs.
- Stage 2 increases thresholds of criteria compliance and introduces more clinical decision support, care-coordination requirements and rudimentary patient engagement rules.
- Stage 3 focuses on robust health information exchange as well as other more fully formed meaningful use guidelines introduced in earlier stages.
According to the provisions of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, organizations eligible for the Medicare EHR incentive program must attest to meaningful use by 2014 to be eligible for EHR incentive payments. Providers must attest to meaningful use stage 1 for two years before moving onto stage 2, and attest to stage 2 for two years before tackling stage 3.