As I mentioned in my previous post on the ARRA EHR stimulus payments under Medicare, a clinic needs to have at least $24k in allowable charges in order to receive the full EMR stimulus money of $18k. This poll is an attempt to get an idea of if most doctors offices have over $24k in allowable charges or not. I imagine Obama and company looked at this number when planning for ARRA, but I haven’t seen any data on how many clinics will be eligible for the full $18k in EMR stimulus money.
Thanks for the input. I think it will also be interesting to see how many people respond that they don’t take Medicare either. I probably should also do something similar for Medicaid. I guess that’s a future post.
Can you please clear something up for me? Are the stimulus payments per provider or per site? If you have an office with 5 doc’s do they get 40,000 or 200,000? Thanks!
It’s actually 44k per provider. Assuming the provider has enough allowable Medicare charges. You can see a nice image of the pay schedule: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2009/07/08/arra-ehr-stimulus-payments-under-medicare/
Thanks John! It’s Friday and I am easily confused!
Have a great weekend!
Does every physician have to have an EMR. Is it based at all on size of practice or revenue?
The reimbursements are done per physician. So, it seems possible that one physician in an office could use an EMR and get the stimulus money. Although, it will be based on the Medicare allowable charges for that particular physician. So, the size of the Medicare patient load for the physician that qualifies is the size that matters.
What is defined as “allowable charges”? is it the entire cost of the EMR or only certain aspects?
Henri,
Allowable charges actually refers to your Medicare claims. So, it’s only the allowable charges that you send to Medicare that apply to the calculation.
The EMR stimulus money the doctor gets can be spent on anything at all. For Medicare it doesn’t specify where the stimulus money will have to be spent.