An alliance that claims more than 2,300 community-based hospitals as members is pressing Congress to fix the final rule on meaningful use to ensure that every hospital receives its fair share of incentive payments provided under the HITECH Act.
The Premier healthcare alliance submitted a statement Tuesday to the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health at a hearing on meaningful use. The panel's chairman is Pete Starkef="/directory/stark-law-physician-self-referral-law" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">Stark (D-Calif.).
The issue, executives of the Charlotte, N.C.-based organization, said, focuses on different inpatient facilities operating under one provider number.
The final meaningful use rule, announced last week, would allow only one Medicare incentive base payment per year for multiple inpatient facilities operating under the same Medicare provider number. By contrast, Premier executives said, a hospital with multiple inpatient facilities operating under separate Medicare provider numbers would receive a base payment for each facility.
"This is a crucial issue for Premier alliance hospitals and could financially handicap co-located and multi-campus hospitals' ability to implement EHRs in a timely manner," the alliance wrote in its statement. "More than 50 Premier alliance hospital systems representing more than 100 inpatient facilities are affected by this methodological error by CMS, which will cost them millions of dollars in EHR incentive payments."
"Despite receiving hundreds of comments on this specific issue in response to its proposed rule published on Jan.13, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services chose not to make any changes to its methodology for calculating a qualifying hospital's Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive payment," Premier said. "By not modifying its methodology, CMS creates an arbitrary and inequitable distinction between identical hospital systems based solely on whether a system has multiple inpatient facilities operating under a single Medicare provider number."