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Meaningful Use: Stage 2 Clarifying Tips

09 Oct

Newly published information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that specifies the Stage 2 criteria for Meaningful Use is now available for eligible professionals, hospitals, and critical access hospitals. This information includes a tip sheet giving additional details. However, providers should keep in mind that before meeting these requirements, participants must achieve meaningful use under the Stage 1 criteria.

This tip sheet offers professionals a timeline illustrating the progression of meaningful use stages from when a Medicare provider begins participation in the program. While during the first year of participation, providers must demonstrate meaningful use for a 90-day electronic health record reporting period, the subsequent years will require a full year HER reporting period.

This full-year period is defined as an entire fiscal year for hospitals or an entire calendar year for EPs, except in 2014. Providers participating only in Medicaid HER Incentive Programs are not required to demonstrate meaningful use in consecutive years. However, their movement through the stages would follow the same structure of two years meeting the criteria of each stage, including a 90-day HER reporting period during the first year. 

As stated above, the reporting rules for 2014 differ from prior years. In 2014, all providers, regardless of their stage of meaningful use, are only required to demonstrate meaningful use for a three-month reporting period. CMS will be offering this one-time three-month reporting period in order to enable providers who must upgrade to 2014 Certified HER Technology to have time to implement their new Certified HER systems. This three-month period will be restricted for Medicare providers to the quarter of either the fiscal or calendar year. Medicaid providers who are only eligible for Medicaid EGR incentives will not be restricted to a fixed reporting period, since providers do not have the same alignment needs. 

The tip sheet explains that Stage 2 retains the core and menu structure for meaningful use objectives from Stage 1. While some Stage 1 objectives were eliminated, the majority of them are core objectives under Stage 2 and the threshold that providers must prove has simply been raised. This threshold includes demonstrating meaningful use of Certified HER Technology to a larger portion of their patient populations. 

At the core of the tip sheet are two Stage 2 criteria:

  • EPs must meet 3 menu objectives and 17 core objectives selected from a total list of 6, creating a total of 20 core objectives.
  • Hospitals that are eligible and CAHs must meet 3 menu objectives and 16 core objectives selected from a list of 6, for a total of 19 core objectives.

The tip sheet concludes with a complete list of the Stage 2 core and menu objectives for all participants, including a downloadable table. 

With the next stage of meaningful use now available, health care providers have ample resources from CMS to make sure that they meet guidelines and reap the benefits.