News: AMA makes EHR recommendations to CMS

The AMA urged CMS and ONC to work toward improving EHR functionality for physicians and to enhance patient care. Changes recommended by the AMA included:

• Adopting a flexible approach for meeting meaningful use
• Aligning quality measure requirements with meaningful use requirements to reduce the reporting burden and overlapping penalties
• Ensuring EHR clinical decision support and quality measures are current and follow the latest clinical evidence to improve care for patients
• Restructuring and simplifying the EHR certification to focus on key areas like interoperability and usability
• Making some of the most challenging objectives optional (e.g., view, download and transmit, transitions of care, secure messaging)
• Placing less focus on primary care for stage 3 meaningful use by expanding the options for health IT objectives to meet the needs of specialists
• Requiring physicians to meet no more than 10 requirements for health IT objectives for stage 3 meaningful use

The AMA also made recommendations for improving stages 1 and 2 of the meaningful use program. It is advocating for the removal of penalties for physicians who are attempting to meet program requirements, but have not yet met 100% of requirements. The AMA recommended that CMS and ONC remove penalties for physicians who meet at least 50% of stage 1 and 2 requirements.