With Afia’s help, Coleman Professional Services has received their first state of Ohio Medicaid Meaningful Use dollars. They have been using the Qualifacts EHR system and completed all of the necessary forms and registration to help receive the funding. Afia provided guidance and ongoing consulting to help develop Coleman’s IT Strategy and ensure proper methods were followed in the registration process.

If you haven’t started your planning and implementation for meaningful use, you are already behind. To date CMS has already paid out $37.6M in incentives. It is important to begin your process for registration with the ONC. You can start that here ->

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has paid out nearly $37.6 million so far in electronic health record incentives, according to a CMS posting on its Twitter page March 25.

CMS has also registered 25,217 eligible healthcare physicians and hospitals for its incentive programs.

The agency continues its webinars to help healthcare providers participate in the CMS Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive programs. MORE ->

As physician’s offices, hospitals, and community health centers prepare their IT systems for meaningful use certification many people are finding that it is much more difficult than advertised to figure out if their systems will meet the certification criteria. Since there are many different ways to meet meaningful use, Afia is working with organizations across the country to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to take advantage of the available stimulus funding.

For more information on avoiding some of the pitfalls of meaningful use, click on the following link for an article from Healthcare IT News: Physicians Wrestle with Technical Details of Meaningful Use.

Today CMS launched a system to allow eligible hospitals and eligible providers to register to receive incentive payments related to Meaningful Use of certified EHR technology. It will be important for all eligible professionals to register themselves and setup their online account. If you are part of a healthcare system, you should consult with your administration to determine how you should register.

Register for Meaningful Use here: https://ehrincentives.cms.gov/hitech/login.action

Today the Office of the National Coordinator published on their website the list of vendors that have been certified by HHS under the Temporary Certification Program. This will be an important resource to check to ensure your vendor has been certified and recognized by the ONC. Whether you already have an EHR system or are in the process of searching, it is critical to ensure that your vendor has a plan for certification and a plan for ensuring Meaningful Use.

Each Complete EHR and EHR Module included in the CHPL has been tested and certified by an ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ATCB), and reported to ONC by an ONC-ATCB, with reports validated by ONC. Only those EHR technologies appearing on the ONC-CHPL may be granted the reporting number that will be accepted by CMS for purposes of attestation under the EHR Incentive Programs.

The listing will be updated as additional products are certified by ONC-ATCBs and reported to ONC for validation.

For more information, you can visit http://healthit.hhs.gov/CHPL.

On Monday August 30, 2010, the ONC announced that there will be two official certifying bodies for Electronic Health Records. This is good news because now there will be options for smaller vendors or home grown systems, and it should drive the costs down. This will also create competition to drive the certification process in a more efficient and effective direction.

Initial EHR Certification Bodies Named

Key step in national initiative toward adoption of electronic health records

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), Chicago, Ill. and the Drummond Group Inc. (DGI), Austin, Texas, were named today by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the first technology review bodies that have been authorized to test and certify electronic health record (EHR) systems for compliance with the standards and certification criteria that were issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year. Read More ->

Today CCHIT announced certifications for behavioral health either as an add-on to the ambulatory certification or as a stand-alone certification. This is important in that it helps recognize behavioral health as a player in the specialty field as well as bringing standardization to the behavioral health vendor community for what is needed.

A concern here is that CCHIT is not the only certifying body and this certification will need to meet all of the meaningful use certification requirements.

Read More

Today CMS launched a website devoted to the EHR incentives for both Medicare and Medicaid. This is a useful tool to help bring organizations up to speed on where the incentives are and what the federal government is doing. This site is definitely a resource and is not busy with many visuals or graphics.

Please let us know if there is anything that Afia can help your organization with to ensure that your organization receives all their incentives.

http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/

Jeremy presented today in Baltimore at the Mental Health Corporations of America’s spring conference about Creating Strategies and Managing Risk through IT Portfolios. This presentation focused on how your organization can create IT strategic plans to align business goals and support your underlying infrastructure of technology.

Click on the image below to download the presentation

In the afternoon, Jeremy discussed Vendor selection and demonstrated the Afia selection tool as a way to evaluate and manage different vendors and competing priorities.