OIG to Include Meaningful Use and EHR Incentive Reviews – Meaningful Use Monday

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.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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