South Nabs Largest Share of EHR Incentive Payments

The typical hospital receiving Medicare incentive payments to reward electronic health record implementation in 2011 was a large, urban acute-care hospital that tended to be located in the South.
 
At least that’s what you get when you combine a series of findings by the Government Accountability Office, which reviewed 761 hospitals receiving $1.3 billion in Medicare incentive payments for achieving meaningful use of EHRs. The median payment was $1.7 million, with payments ranging from $22,300 to $4.4 million, according to a summary of the July 26 report.
 
Specific findings include:

• 
  The South had the largest proportion of hospital incentive recipients at 44 percent, while the Northeast had the lowest proportion at 12 percent.
• About two-thirds were in urban areas and 86 percent were acute-care hospitals.
• The largest one-third of hospitals in terms of number of beds represented 46 percent of incentive recipients.
• Acute-care hospitals were more than twice as likely to receive incentives as critical-care hospitals.
• Government-owned hospitals were less likely than either nonprofit or for-profit hospitals to receive payments.
• The GAO also analyzed 56,585 medical professionals who have received $967 million in incentive payments, finding once again that the largest proportion (32 percent) were in the South. The West had the lowest proportion at 17 percent. Only 9 percent of eligible professionals received payments.

• 89 percent were in urban areas, half were specialty-practice physicians and 38 percent were general practitioners.
• Previous participants in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ e-prescribing program were nearly four times as likely to receive an incentive payment.
• Technical assistance from a Regional Extension Center more than doubled a health professional’s chance of receiving incentives.
• Providers with large numbers of Medicare Part B patients were more than three times as likely to receive incentive payments as those with the fewest Part B patients.