2015: End Of The Road For Meaningful Use?

Frank Irving | Medical Practice Insider | January 5, 2015

You can lead doctors to EHR systems — but you can't make them attest.  A poll of nearly 2,000 physicians, in fact, reveals that 55 percent do not plan to attest for meaningful use Stage 2 in 2015.

Medical Practice Insider teamed with SERMO to ask members of its physician community about their attestation intentions in the coming year. We posed one simple yes-or-no question: Do you plan to attest for Stage 2 in 2015?  The answer? Doctors are opting to forego Stage 2 by a margin of 994 to 822 participants.

About 75 percent of office-based primary care physicians had some form of EHR system in 2012, according to the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.  Since the 2009 enactment of the HITECH Act, which established the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs for eligible professionals (EPs) and hospitals, nearly two-thirds of physicians who implemented health IT tools said financial incentives and penalties were a major influence to adopt such systems...