CMS Updates Meaningful Use FAQs for Multiple Certified EHRs
Coming a little too late for hospitals and eligible professionals who have already attested or begun to attest for 2012, CMS has kindly taken a step back on Meaningful Use requirements for accounting for unique patients in calculating numerators and denominators during attestation in the release of an updated FAQ on April 20. Retracting its previous requirement that any hospital attesting with multiple certified EHR technology, or any eligible professional seeing patients at multiple locations with certified EHR technology, reconcile the various reports generated by the certified EHR technology to ensure only “unique patients” were counted in the numerators/denominators, CMS now permits hospitals and eligible professionals to simply add the numerators and denominators from the reports generated by the certified EHR technology.
CMS states,
For objectives that require an action to be taken on behalf of a percentage of “unique patients” (e.g., the objectives of “Record demographics”, “Record vital signs”, etc.), EPs, eligible hospitals, and CAHs may also add the numerators and denominators calculated by each certified EHR system in order to arrive at an accurate total for the numerator and denominator of the measure. Previously CMS had advised providers to reconcile information so that they only reported unique patients. However, because it is not possible for providers to increase their overall percentage of actions taken by adding numerators and denominators from multiple systems, we now permit simple addition for all meaningful use objectives.
This therefore removes one step from the attestation process, eliminating the need to reconcile various reports to ensure patients aren’t counted twice. However, hospitals and eligible professionals still must count any patients whose records are not maintained in certified EHR technology where applicable in order to provide accurate numbers. All of the CMS FAQs are available on the newly designed CMS Frequently Asked Questions page by clicking on the topic “Electronic Health Records Incentive Programs.”
