Can Providers Keep Up With MU?

By Greg Bengel, contributing writer

At the Senate Finance Committee hearing on health IT, one senator suggests suspending MU for reassessment, while witnesses fear a pause would stop provider momentum

At the July 17 Senate Finance Committee hearing “Health Information Technology: A Building Block to Quality Health Care,” a major source of disagreement centered on a simple question: with the Meaningful Use (MU) program now speeding along, can providers keep up?

Senator Orinn Hatch doesn’t think they can, going so far as to suggest temporarily suspending and reassessing the MU program. Referencing the Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare System, which has made much progress in informatics, Hatch expressed they were the exception, not the rule. He tells the committee that, “size, sophistication, and availability of resources vary greatly” from provider to provider, and that “if we ignore problems along the way and simply expect everyone to catch up, we will be in worse shape.” Read Hatch’s entire opening statement in this press release from the United States Senate Committee on Finance.

More generally, Hatch fears that the program isn’t working. “The federal government cannot afford to spend money on programs that don’t yield results,” he told the committee. “At the same time, providers can’t afford to invest in systems that don’t work or have to be overhauled a year later as requirements change.” He also said, “It would seem to me that we have an opportunity to push the pause button and make sure that the program is working before we continue down a potentially unsustainable path.”

But provider’s worry that a “pause” might mean killing momentum, according to witnesses Farzad Mostashari, M.D., national coordinator for health IT, and Patrick Conway, chief medical officer at CMS. Mostashari said to the Committee, as quoted in Clinical Innovation + Technology, “A pause in the program would stall the progress that has been hard fought,” and also, “We need to meet the urgency of the moment for the transformation of healthcare. A pause would take the momentum away from the progress.”

The article gives further insight into the dispute. Sen. Max Baucus echoed Sen. Hatch’s concerns, saying that rural providers need more time for Stage 2, and that they would struggle with the adoption of EHRs. Mostashari countered, “I’d much rather see rural hospitals keep up rather than assume they’ll fall behind.” He also said that nationwide extension programs are working with small providers to overcome complications in EHR adoption.

Mostashari also countered Sen. Ron Wyden’s objection that providers are having a hard time accessing data from Medicare and Medicaid. According to Mostashari, “Providers are now getting more data from Medicare than they ever have been before.”