National health IT coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo (left) and acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt at HIMSS16.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally is offering Meaningful Use-type incentives to long-term care, behavioral health and substance abuse care providers. It’s part of a wider effort to morph the electronic health records program into what acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt has said would be “something better” than Meaningful Use.
It’s not the final rule for the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System that rolls several Medicare incentive programs into one — or any other regulations under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). Those are still several months away, Slavitt said late Tuesday at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas.
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Instead, Slavitt’s Medicaid director, Vikki Wachino, sent a letter to state Medicaid directors saying that CMS has found money to provide states with 90 percent matching federal funds for these classes of providers. It’s in the name of “importance of coordination of care across providers and transitions of care in Meaningful Use modified Stage 2 and Stage 3,” Wachino wrote.
The 2009 HITECH Act specifically excluded nonphysician behavioral health and addiction professionals — anybody other than psychiatrists —from Meaningful Use. Also left out were long-term care facilities. These groups remain ineligible for Medicare health IT incentives.
CMS made this move to encourage interoperability that supports care coordination and smoother transitions. During a well-attended session in a large theater in the Venetian hotel-casino, Slavitt emphasized this point.
“Physicians are hampered and frustrated by the lack of interoperability,” he said. That’s one of three themes that are shaping the federal health IT agenda now, along with poor EHR usability and regulations that encourage healthcare professionals to check boxes rather than produce better care.
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Physicians want CMS to “stop measuring our clicks,” Slavitt said. “Let outcomes rather than activities drive the agenda.”
Sharing the stage with Slavitt was national health IT coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo. “I bet you all have this intense sense that there is this buildup of this immense amount of health information on the supply side that needs to be set free,” DeSalvo said, playing up the interoperability angle herself.
