Meaningful Use Attestations in 2011: CMS/ONC Raw Dataset Tells Hospital Story
CMS and ONC recently released a raw dataset (link) that we’ve been told identifies the certified vendors used by those providers that have attested to meaningful use in FFY 2011. The dataset includes a unique attester id # column and a hospital “specialty” column that make it possible to identify how many hospitals (by hospital type) have attested to meaningful use through November.
Based on a number of assumptions (see end of post), I’ve generated what I believe are pretty good estimates of the percentage of hospitals that have attested to meaningful use in 2011. The nationwide results are directly below. Scroll further down for state-by-state results
2011 FFY # and % of MU Attesting Hospitals
|
# of All Hospitals Attesting in FFY 2011 |
# of CAHs Attesting in FFY 2011 |
# of PPS Hospitals Attesting in FFY 2011 |
|
833 |
113 |
720 |
|
# of All Hospitals |
# of CAHs |
# of PPS Hospitals |
|
5332 |
1327 |
4005 |
|
% of All Hospitals Attesting in FFY 2011 |
% of CAHs Attesting in FFY 2011 |
% of PPS Hospitals Attesting in FFY 2011 |
|
16% |
9% |
18% |
To assess what this data means, it’s important to understand where we started. Thanks to Neal Neuberger (Executive Director of the Institute for e-Health Policy) and HIMSS, we have the below 2009 percentages for comparison.
2009 HIMSS EMR Adoption Data
Stage 1 meaningful use can be characterized as Stage 4+ on the HIMSS EMR Adoption Scale. Hospitals that had achieved Stage 4 HIMSS EMRAM in 2009 had already performed most of the implementation work required to achieve Stage 1 meaningful use. In 2009, just over 10% of PPS hospitals had achieved Stage 4 and fewer than 3% of critical access hospitals had achieved Stage 4. Compare this to an estimated 18% of PPS hospitals and 9% of CAHs that have attested to meaningful use in 2011.
It was a forgone conclusion that CAHs and small rural PPS hospitals would continue to have lower levels of HIT adoption than large hospitals and systems (see this link for some of the reasons). What’s interesting about the MU attestation results is the extent to which CAHs appear to have increased their EHR adoption rates between 2009 and 2011, arguably more so than PPS hospitals have.
While CAHs have attested at an impressive rate, it should be pointed out that at a recent HIT Policy Committee meeting CMS officials indicated that 277 hospitals had received a Medicare incentive payment, but only 12 of these were CAHs. This means that while 37% of attesting PPS hospitals had received payment, only 10% of attesting CAHs had received payment. Those of us following these issues know that the reason for this is that CAHs have the administrative burden of needing to justify all of their EHR-related costs to their MACs prior to getting payment, whereas PPS hospitals get an incentive payment based on a fixed formula.
Below find state breakouts and then a list of the assumptions I made to generate the attestation data. [click to continue…]
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