Meaningful-use deadline pushed back one year

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is giving providers another year to show they've met the Stage 2 criteria of the federal government's incentive program to encourage the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. That means the start of the next phase will be pushed back a year.

Stage 2 will be extended through 2016 and Stage 3 won't begin until at least fiscal year 2017 for hospitals and calendar year 2017 for physicians and other eligible professionals that have by then completed at least two years at Stage 2, the CMS said. The latest extension parallels what the feds did with Stage 1, which was originally set to last two years but was lengthened by a year when it appeared the industry would be overstretched to build and get acclimated to systems capable of meeting the federal payment program's more stringent Stage 2 criteria. “The goal of this change is two-fold,” according to a CMS statement from Robert Tagalicod, director of the Office for E-Health Standards and Services at the CMS, and Dr. Jacob Reider, acting head of the ONC, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. The delay, they said, is intended to allow the CMS and ONC to focus on helping providers meet Stage 2's demands for patient engagement, interoperability and information exchange, as well as use data collected during that phase to inform policy decisions for Stage 3. The proposed rules are expected to be released in the fall of 2014 for the requirements providers must meet for Stage 3, as well as the 2017 Edition of standards health IT developers must build and test their systems to match.