Final Medicare & Medicaid EHR Meaningful Use Rules Permit Deferrals, Exclusions

OPEN MINDS Weekly News Wire Strategic Health Care News On July 16, 2010, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released final rules for the Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record (EHR) meaningful use initiative program. The rules for the Stage 1 criteria of meaningful use permit eligible professionals and eligible hospitals the option to defer some objectives/measures and to permit exclusions for the applicability of some objectives/measures. CMS developed the deferral option, which was not in the proposed rule released in January 2010, after reviewing concerns in the more than 2,000 comments it received . . .