CMS extends deadline for 2016 “Meaningful Use and Physician Quality Reporting System (PORS)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have extended reporting deadlines for 2014 Meaningful use and the Physician Quality Reporting System(PQRS) until March 20, 2015. The Meaningful Use extension applies only to the Medicare Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Program. The extensions do not affect deadlines for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.  As Providers already have too much on their plates to focus, CMS has offered grace time to confirm Meaningful Use for 2014 reporting year.

Individual eligible professionals (EPs), PQRS group practices, qualified clinical data registries (QCDRs), and qualified EHR data submission vendors (DSVs) now have until March 31, 2017 to submit 2016 EHR data via QRDA (the original submission deadline was March 13, 2017). The extended deadline allows EPs to electronically report electronic Clinical Quality Measures (ecQMs) for the Medicare EHR incentive programme.

What is Meaningful Use?

Meaningful use (MU), in a health information technology (HIT) context, defines minimum U.S. government standards for using electronic health records (EHR) and for exchanging patient clinical data between healthcare providers, between healthcare providers and insurers, and between healthcare providers and patients.

Its rules, known as meaningful use measures or meaningful use criteria, determine whether or not a healthcare provider may receive federal funds from the Medicare EHR Incentive Program, the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program or both, in cases of “dually eligible” practitioners (EP) and eligible hospitals (EH).

CMS’s Deadline Extension on ‘Meaningful Use’ and ‘PQRS’:

1. CMS has announced it is extending the deadline for 2014 MU attestation and offering extensions to certain aspects of the Physician Quality Reporting System according to AAFP reports. “Eligible professionals now have until 11:59 p.m. ET on March 20, 2015.
2. Although CMS has officially extended the deadline to allow providers extra time to submit their meaningful use data. CMS continues to urge providers to begin attesting for 2014 as soon as they can.
3. This deadline extension does not apply for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.
4. This deadline extension can be applied to the EHR reporting option, the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) as well.
5. An important thing to note is that the attestation to Meaningful Use should happen every year. Eligible professionals who successfully do it every year will be awarded with incentives. Else, they will have to face a Medicare payment adjustment that comes in to effect on Jan 1, 2016.
6. However, it allows eligible professionals to make a switch from Medicare to Medicaid or vice versa. It is advisable that eligible professionals make full use of this time period as they will not be allowed to switch programs after the specified deadline.