In a notice published in the Federal Register, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has signaled its intention to assess the readiness of public health agencies and registries in the support meaningful use requirements for eligible professionals and hospitals.
The collection of this information is among two other collection efforts by CMS: one for Medicare health outcomes involving the Medicare Advantage program; the other for reinsurance, risk corridors, risk adjustment, and payment appeal standards as a result of provisions of the Affordable Care Act. These other collection activities are not new but instead are revisions to currently approved collection.
In its summary of collection activities (e.g., type, use), CMS outlines the role public health agencies and requires play in the successful demonstration of meaningful use by eligible providers in Stage 1 and Stage 2 Meaningful Use (and presumably any future stages of the EHR Incentive Programs).
The public health reporting requirements for Stage 1 Meaningful Use aim at ensuring that the certified EHR technology (CEHRT) are capable of sending information to public health agencies and registries. Stage 2 Meaningful Use, meanwhile, requires that eligible providers are actually submitting electronic data to public health agencies and registries.
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As the federal agency emphasizes in yesterday’s notice, CEHRT needs to capable of sending electronic data to public health organizations and systems, which must be capable of receiving this information. Feedback from the public on the subject of Stage 2 Meaningful Use, however, call attention to burdens associated with the process and argued that “the burden for each individual eligible provider to determine the readiness of multiple public health agencies and registries could be nearly eliminated if we were to maintain a database on the readiness of public health agencies and registries,” states the CMS notice.
Agreeing with this public commentary, CMS decided to pursue the creation of a database with the purpose of minimizing these burdens on eligible providers for public health meaningful use objectives of which this new collection activity is the first step.
According to CMS, the data collection will ultimately be made publicly available online via the CMS EHR Incentive Programs website “in order to provide a centralized repository of this information to eligible providers and eliminate there multiple individual inquiries to multiple public health agencies and registries.”
Those wishing to comment on the proposed collection activities have until June 16 to submit their feedback to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Date: May 16, 2014