If You’re Using Medisoft for Meaningful Use – Congressional Report On EMR Adoption

For all those practices and practitioners who have been using Medisoft EMR as part of the meaningful use incentive created under the 2009 HITECH Act, you might be interested in hearing the highlights of the annual report on Health IT infrastructure submitted to Congress earlier in the month. It details how far providers have come in implementing electronic patient records into their patient care, and using electronic medical records in a meaningful way.

In order to encourage the use of EMR technology, Congress authorized incentive payments to medical providers who installed and used an EMR, such as McKesson Medisoft, and met specific benchmarks for use. As part of qualifying for the incentives – which amounted to more than $40,000 over the course of the incentive program – providers had to submit detailed reports showing their use of the EMR. #Medisoft Clinical was a popular choice for many small providers, in part because it included all the support needed to generate and submit the reports required for the meaningful use incentives.

Over the past few years, reports on the adoption of electronic patient records via meaningful use incentives have been, to put it mildly, disheartening. Many of the earlier reports suggested that the country was lagging behind the timetable set out in the law, leading many providers to question their participation and time investment in the program. The latest Congressional report is considerably more encouraging. As of early October 2014, HHS reports that three-quarters of eligible professionals and nine out of 10 eligible hospitals received incentive payments from either Medicare or Medicaid incentive programs. That’s a substantial increase from reports from just a year ago.

In addition, more of the providers are using their EMR programs to electronically exchange patient health information with providers outside their organizations – one of the major benchmarks required to qualify for incentives at this point in the program. The percentage of hospitals who have met the benchmark increased from just over 51 percent in 2008 to more than 60 percent this year. In addition, more than 70 percent of hospitals use an EMR like Medisoft to submit prescriptions on the Surescripts Network, and more than half of all prescriptions are new sent electronically. Both of those statistics represent significant advances over earlier numbers.

In addition, HHS reports other milestones achieved in health IT, including:

• Regional Extension Centers support over 100,000 providers who have achieved Stage 1 Meaningful Use, exceeding the HHS goal
• The State Health Information Exchange Program resulted in 47 states and territories having directed exchange available and 34 having query based exchanges available.
• The Health IT Workforce Development Program trained more than 20,000 students in using EMRs.

Medisoft has continued to be in the forefront of health IT development and infrastructure. The latest versions of Medisoft Clinical not only support meaningful use, it also is ready for the ICD-10 update, and provides tools to help offices transition smoothly when the new standards become final in a year.