What is it about?
Under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- also known as Obamacare -- the federal government, acting via the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, decided to provide incentives payments to hospitals that were able to demonstrate the implementation and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR). Our study explores whether these incentives successfully encouraged Medicare hospitals to adopt EHR in order to improve patient care.
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Why is it important?
This is the only study that explores the government's own data to gauge Medicare hospitals' response to the EHR program.
Perspectives
The way we did this is by exploring whether key deadlines for hospitals to demonstrate meaningful EHR use were correlated with accelerations (spikes) in EHR adoption. We also examined the actual capabilities of the EHR technologies adopted by the hospitals that participated in the program and claimed incentives. It turns out that although the incentives program did speed up EHR adoption, the implemented EHR capabilities were quite baseline ones (as opposed to advanced features). So one may conclude that the Medicare EHR Incentive Program yielded mixed results after the first year of its implementation.
Rajesh Mirani
University of Baltimore
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Medicare Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Program: First-Year Adoption Response from Inpatient Hospitals, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, October 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10919392.2014.956601.
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