Jeff Grant
I hope you’ve already received your first-year EHR incentive payment in 2011, or that you’ve at least completed your 90 days of Meaningful Use in 2011. If you haven’t attested for 2011 yet and plan to, you have 60 days after the end of the year (through February 29, 2012) to attest for the 2011 payment year. Attestation is done through the same portal you used to register for the incentive.
If you haven’t yet attested, I thought it might be helpful to provide some information on common questions I’ve gotten from my clients when they were attesting.
One major question I’ve received is whether it’s okay to have 0% on the Clinical Quality Measures associated with Core Measure 10. The answer is “Yes.” In fact, most practices that aren’t primary care medical practices would have 0% for all three Core Quality Measures and all three Alternate Core Quality Measures — or at least have 0% for the majority of the Core and Alternate Core. Even for the three quality measures you pick in the Menu Set (there are four that are eye-specific), you can report 0%. Currently, there is no threshold you must meet in regard to the Clinical Quality Measures. That will probably change in the future, since it makes no sense to have Quality Measures and not require people to actually “do” the action included in the measure.
For those of you who did not complete 90 days of Meaningful Use in 2011, I hope you will do this in 2012. If you don’t, you’ll begin to lose part of the possible incentive available to you. Just to be clear, if 2012 will be your first payment year, you must complete 90 days of Meaningful Use (any continuous 90 days) during 2012. You can do this any time during the year and attest as soon as you’ve completed the reporting period. Regardless the dates of your 90 day reporting period, you’ll have 60 days after the end of the year to attest.
For those physicians who did (or will) attest for 2011, your reporting in 2012 and in all future years is the entire calendar year.
