Are Physicians Ready To Put A Stop To MU 3?

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Even as more vendors are jumping on board with Meaningful Use (MU) initiatives, physicians are coming forward with more issues with the program.

According to AMA Wire, physician groups have called on Congress to intervene on the MU programs and help alleviate their frustration around the “near impossibility of compliance with meaningless and ill-informed bureaucratic requirements.”

Even More Complex Regulations

The American Medical Association (AMA) and 110 other medical associations sent letters to the Senate and the House in response to the new, Stage 3 regulations which they say are even more disruptive and less achievable than previous requirements.

The letters complain that doctors have been faced with requirement after requirement, few of which exhibit a genuine understanding of the way healthcare actually happens on the ground. They detail multiple negative consequences including:

• physicians losing time from patient care and instead spending it on data entry
• patient records increasingly being populated with documentation that is unrelated to improving quality of care
• new barriers to data exchange being created by the program

CMS Accused Of Setting Unrealistic Expectations

These complaints are highlighted by the fact that while 80 percent of physicians currently have EHRs functioning in their practices, a scant 12 percent have successfully participated in MU Stage 2.

These complaints are nothing new. The AMA sent a similar letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2014 recommending substantial changes to the MU program. The letter suggested a more flexible approach to the program instead of its apparent “all-or-nothing” orientation. Their complaints addressed hardship issues, as well as reporting issues around alignment with the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program and interoperability.

As the program moves toward the most substantial changes to healthcare delivery, physicians are, perhaps ironically, pushing toward the same goal as indicated in the letters, “It is unrealistic to expect that doing the same thing over and over again will result in a different outcome … It is time for Congress to act to refocus the Meaningful Use program on the goal of achieving a truly interoperable system of EHRs [electronic health records] that will support, rather than hinder, the delivery of high-quality care.”