Nearly $7B paid in EHR incentives

Nearly $7 billion has been paid to providers in Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record incentives through the end of August, according to figures to be released later this month by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. A total of 143,800 doctors and hospitals have been paid $6.9 billion, with roughly $500 million of that coming last month, Government Health IT reports. The figures were reported at yesterday's Health IT Policy Committee meeting. "As we move into August, we're no longer looking at just the early adopters, we're looking at people who may still be in their first year of Meaningful Use, but they're not necessarily the people who are at the beginning of the curve," Robert Anthony, a specialist in CMS' Office of eHealth Standards and Services, said, according to the article. "Yet we continue to see very high performance across the board on all the objectives." Article