General acute care hospitals that are meaningful users of electronic health records and that successfully participate in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program will see a final increase in operating payment rates of about 0.95 percent, according to the fiscal year 2017 final payment rule on the hospital inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) and long-term acute care hospitals.
The rule, which was released Aug. 2 and will be published in the Federal Register August 22, notes that hospitals that don’t successfully participate in IQR and that fail to submit their required data will be subject to a one-fourth reduction of the market basket update. Additionally, any hospital that is not a meaningful user of EHRs will be subject to a three-fourths reduction of the market basket update in 2017.
The rule also includes the finalized requirements for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals in the Meaningful Use program. For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services removed some clinical quality measures (CQMs) to align with the IQR program.
It also finalizes the addition of four new claims-based electronic CQMs for FY 2019 payment determinations and subsequent years. It will require hospitals to report on eight eCQMs; the proposed rule would have required reporting on all 15 eCQMs. However, hospitals will still need to report on four quarters of data on an annual basis. Commenters to the proposed rule had suggested that the reporting period be 90 days, not 365; others had warned that many hospitals are not yet prepared for such quality reporting.
As with other payment rules, HHS included a reference to the fact that all providers should be adopting EHRs.
“We believe that the use of certified EHRs by LTCHs [and other types of providers that are ineligible for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs] can effectively and efficiently help providers improve internal care delivery practices, support the exchange of important information across care partners and during transitions of care, and enable the reporting of electronically specified clinical quality measures [eCQMs],” HHS states in the rule.
To learn more:
- read the rule