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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and CMS will accept comments through  the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the EHR Incentive Program for Medicare and Medicaid.

The proposed rule contains 25 measures that providers must use to qualify for federal incentives beginning January 2011. The rule also contains 23 measures through which hospitals must demonstrate meaningful use of healthcare IT for incentives beginning Oct. 1, 2011. The incentives are spelled out in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Jodi Daniel, the ONC's director of the Office of Policy and Research, said the ONC's ability to change the proposed rule will be limited to removing or tweaking aspects already there. The government is prohibited from adding anything new to the proposed rule because it will not have allowed for that item to have prior public comment, Daniel said.

The Interim Final Rule (IFR) on Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications and Certification Criteria for EHRs – also published Jan. 13 – will not be as easy to change, Daniel said.

Janet Corrigan, a member of the HIT Standards Committee, said she's surprised the rule proposes to use more measures than were recommended by both the healthcare IT Policy and HIT Standards advisory committees. Though these measures are grounded in national priorities, she said, they might not have been selected had the federal government started with a clean slate.

Corrigan is president of the National Quality Forum, a non-profit organization of healthcare stakeholders who help to set care standards. Most of the measures adopted by the ONC and CMS for the proposed rule were taken from those approved by NQF.

Trudel, along with other federal officials who worked on the rules, said it will be difficult for the government to find a sweet spot between those who want the bar raised to achieve health quality outcomes sooner and those who want it lowered to increase the likelihood of healthcare IT adoption.

Source: CMS

You can get more details about healthcare IT & its related topics in our  healthcare IT User Group.