Sometimes, the money made for pursuing bureaucratic pursuits is not worth the time required to fulfill them. This is becoming especially true for "meaningful use" criteria that have been developed by the government to penalize doctors if they don’t use the Electronic Medical Record in a "meaningful" way. The roll-out of punitive measures to "encourage" doctors use of EMRs began with varying "stages" of required compliance and threatens to implode upon itself:
For Stage 1, physicians have to meet a total of 15 core (required) measures, select five measures of their choice from a menu set of ten, and also meet six clinical quality measures. For Stage 2, physicians are required to meet more measures: 17 core measures, an additional three measures of their choice from a menu set of six measures, and starting in 2014, meet nine clinical quality measures. The Health IT Policy Committee’s proposal for Stage 3 would nearly double the number of measures physicians would have to meet for each patient in order to avoid meaningful use financial penalties. Failing to meet just one measure by one percent would make a physician ineligible for incentives and face the same financial penalties during the penalty phase as those physicians who make no effort to adopt EHRs.
You read that correctly. If you do all the clicky computer things the government wants with each patient visit, you will not have time to care for your patients. So never mind if you don’t have a clue what all these "stages" of computer use actually mean because I can help you:
With the proposed Stage 3 Meaningful Use criteria coming down the pike, you will be penalized for using the Electronic Medical Record because you don’t use it well enough no matter how hard you try. After all, patient care is not the priority, computers are.
Any questions?
(Yeah, it’s hard to make this stuff up.)
-Wes
Reference: AMA Letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
