Dr. William “Bill” Bria, CMIO for the HCI Group, addresses Congress to secure additional time for hospitals to meet federal deadlines for implementing 2014 Edition Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) and Stage 2 Meaningful Use.

Health IT leaders remain focused on improving patient care despite possible loss of federal incentive payments.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – U.S. hospitals could forfeit millions of dollars of incentive payments if they don't demonstrate meaningful use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the federal fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

But health-care information technology leaders continue to push for EHR adoption as a means to improve patient care.

“It's not a matter of everyone saying they want every dollar. They're just saying they don't want to be out of the entire process,” said Dr. William Bria, chief medical information officer for The HCI Group, a global health IT firm.

As chairman of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS), Bria recently joined other health IT leaders in urging Congress to secure additional time for hospitals to meet federal deadlines for implementing 2014 Edition Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) and Stage 2 Meaningful Use.

Hospitals must meet the so-called Stage 2 Meaningful Use standard during the new federal fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2015. Practitioners must do so by the end of next year.

However, as of mid-September, only 143 of the 3,800 hospitals that were required to be Stage 2 ready by Sept. 30, 2014—or less than 4 percent—had demonstrated an ability to meet those requirements. Only 3,152 of the 237,000 eligible professionals required to meet Stage 2 requirements—or 1.3 percent—had demonstrated an ability to do so.

Additional time and flexibility would help hundreds of thousands of providers meet Stage 2 requirements in an effective and safe manner, leaders of hospital, physician and health IT organizations wrote in a Sept. 15 letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell. “This will reinforce investments made to date and it will ensure continued momentum towards the goals of Stage 3, including enhanced care coordination and interoperability,” according to the letter, which was endorsed by 17 associations, including AMDIS.

In a mid-September visit to Washington, D.C., Bria and other health IT leaders urged legislators to support The Flexibility in Health IT Reporting (Flex-It) Act of 2014 (H.R. 5481), which directs the Secretary of HHS to permit the use of a 90-day EHR reporting period to demonstrate meaningful use, rather than 12 months.

Congressmen grasped the ramifications of failing to adopt the 90-day reporting period, but acknowledged that they were unlikely to do so because of political gridlock that has stymied the passage of legislation in general, Bria said. “Hopefully with a crescendo of petitioning and lobbying as time goes by there will be some relief for hospitals and physicians.”

AMDIS will continue to advocate through its partnership with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), Bria said. CHIME is sharing its lobbyists and resources with AMDIS as they pursue their common goal of improving patient care through technology.

“The good news is that rather than talking of a national agenda for health informatics as we have done for all these years, we have one,” Bria said. “We have a vision of a nation delivering health care that's always able to be improved and advanced, and is done in a systematic way.”

Though costly for hospitals in terms of lost incentive payments, the unwillingness of federal regulators and legislators to provide additional time and flexibility for health-care providers to comply with Stage 2 Meaningful Use standards should prove to be a temporary setback in EHR adoption, Bria said.

“Incentive dollars aren't the be all and end all,” Bria said. “It's a long-term vision of adopting a tool that can improve quality of care."

“This is a big bump but it's a bump in the road. It's not time to lose faith in why we started to do it. It's quite the opposite.”