We've reached a significant milestone with the release of the last two final rules providers will need to meet to demonstrate "meaningful use" of certified electronic health records (EHR), a significant step toward qualifying for the first phase of EHR incentives under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
The two rules released, one on meaningful use and related payment policies from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and one on certification and standards from the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT (ONC), set out the ground rules for what our customers must do to achieve meaningful use and what we must do to ensure that our products receive ARRA certification. Over the past several months we have worked to understand these proposals and to prepare our products to meet the expected final criteria.
Our teams are now engaged in a focused review of these rules so that we fully understand and can act on changes from the initial proposals. As we anticipated, much of the proposed structure has been kept in place but, as we also advocated and expected, it appears that CMS and ONC have made important changes that will make achieving meaningful use a more realistic prospect for providers.
Most importantly, our work to help our customers meet these requirements is on target, and we will be communicating our timelines for certifying and releasing our ARRA EMR solutions shortly.
We appreciate the diligent work done by the administration and Congress to reach this conclusion and are optimistic we can work within the final guidelines to help ensure success for our customers.