Most hospitals would struggle to meet meaningful use now

Unless significant progress has been made in the last year and continues into 2011, few hospitals will achieve "meaningful use" of EHRs and earn Medicare and Medicaid bonus payments, a new study suggests.

Based on an annual American Hospital Association survey for 2009, just 2.1 percent of nonfederal acute-care hospitals would comply with the recently finalized standards for Stage 1 meaningful use in 2011 and 2012, according to a paper published in Health Affairs. Though 11.9 percent of U.S. hospitals that aren't owned by the federal government had either basic or comprehensive EHRs in 2009, as defined by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology--up from 8.7 percent a year earlier--few systems in place meet all nine core objectives for meaningful use by hospitals.

While about 7.5 percent of large hospitals have systems that meet all nine core measures, small, rural and critical-access facilities lag far behind. "If certain types of hospitals fall further behind in adoption and meaningful use, they would be at a serious disadvantage in each of these realms. This potential gap could have important implications for the health of the nearly 60 percent of Americans who receive care in small or medium-size hospitals and for the sizable proportion who receive care in public or rural hospitals," the researchers, representing the AHA and Harvard University, write.

"Federal policy makers need to take concrete actions now to address this emerging digital divide and to ensure that all Americans, regardless of where they receive care, derive the benefits that health IT has to offer," the authors of the Health Affairs piece conclude.

Still, there is some reason for optimism, as 53 percent of all hospitals likely meet at least five of the measures, and 21 percent need to add just one or two more features to comply, researchers found.

For more information:
- read the study in Health Affairs
- check out this AHA News brief

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