We all knew that meaningful use audits were on their way. Healthcare IT News is reporting that the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will undertake a review of ARRA which will include probes into the EHR stimulus program.
“We will review Medicare incentive payments to eligible health care professionals and hospitals for adopting electronic health records (EHR) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) safeguards to prevent erroneous incentive payments, the OIG’s states in its work plan for fiscal year 2013.
In its plan OIG states it will look at incentive payments CMS made beginning in 2011 to identify payments to providers that should not have received incentive payments – those that did not meet the meaningful use criteria.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Considering meaningful use is a self attestation process, then it’s just common sense that the self attestation will receive an audit to help ensure that people attested to meaningful use properly.
Plus, if you’re a regular reader of this site, you might remember that we’ve written about meaningful use audits a few times before. I don’t know anyone that likes audits, but Lynn Scheps provided a good list of suggestions on what documentation you should keep from your meaningful use attestation.
If you’re part of a meaningful use audit or hear about what’s involved in the meaningful use audits, please do let us know in the comments. We’d love to learn from those who have first hand experience with the process.