The US. Senate has approved a bill exempting patient encounters performed in an ambulatory surgery centers (ASC) from meaningful use requirements. The Electronic Health Fairness Act of 2015 was approved by unanimous consent and now heads to the President. If signed as expected, the new law would go into effect on January 1, 2016 (the start of the 2016 MU reporting period).
Under the Medicare EHR incentive program, eligible professionals must (in addition to meeting MU objectives) perform at least half of their outpatient encounters in a facility with a certified EHR in order to earn the MU incentives and avoid the associated penalty. At issue is the lack of alignment between EHR certification criteria and ASC requirements. This legislation would exempt encounters in ASCs “when calculating whether an eligible professional meets meaningful use” until such time as “EHR technology is certified specifically for use in ambulatory surgery centers”, unless providers wish to include these encounters. (See here and here for more details.)
Impact for NextGen Healthcare clients: This change in the MU rules will give ambulatory surgery centers the flexibility to adopt technology appropriate to their clinical requirements. At the same time, providers performing services may still be eligible professionals and therefore required to include encounters from other care settings in their meaningful use calculations. The NextGen® Health Quality Measures (NextGen HQM) portal allows users to exclude specific locations from measure calculations, so ambulatory surgery centers that want to take advantage of this change by excluding their ASC locations have the flexibility to do so.