The government has paid out more than $22 billion in Meaningful Use incentives and it is about time you joined the bandwagon in case you haven’t already.

The last date to begin your reporting period for the Meaningful Use program is July 1, 2014. So get your act together and start putting your Electronic Health Record (EHR) software to a more ‘meaningful’ use. Additionally, there are many more reasons to start your program today. Let’s discuss.

Deadline: 2014

This year is going to be the last to begin the Medicare EHR Incentive program and enable yourself to earn up to $24,000 until 2017. However, in order to do that, you must ‘meaningfully use’ a certified EHR like CureMD for a reporting period of 90 days and attest to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) before the deadline of October 1, 2014. However, the last day to start a Meaningful Use EHR reporting period in order to attest by October 1, 2014 is July 1, 2014.

Penalties from 2015

Medicare will start imposing penalties from January 1, 2015 on eligible providers who do not meet Meaningful Use criteria for the first time in 2014 and are unable to attest for the program before the deadline of October 1, 2014.

These penalties will start at 1% of your Medicare Part B reimbursements and will continue to increase by 1% every year if you do not meet Meaningful Use criteria. Learn more about CMS penalties here.

Start as soon as possible

Adoption of an Electronic Health Record system and adhering to the Meaningful Use criteria will not be possible in a day. On average, most providers need several attempts to be able to meet Meaningful Use criteria in the first year. So make sure you start as soon as possible in order to give yourself some time to develop a workflow that works best for you and your practice.

Take advantage of Meaningful Use program with CureMD

While you earn government incentives such as Meaningful Use attestation by using CureMD, you also take advantage of our other benefits available to you at a very low cost such as:

• Customizable templates: You can create completely customizable templates or use hundreds of pre-built templates to help you chart more efficiently.
• Advanced reporting: In addition to the Meaningful Use reports, you can also run custom reports which help you identify specific areas of your patient population.
• Enterprise scheduling: Through our enterprise scheduling, you can easily schedule patients on the move and send reminders, enter co-pays, see appointment statuses and other things which matter to you at a glance.
• Interoperability: CureMD is a completely interoperable solution which means you are able to connect to hundreds of labs integrated with our system, radiology/imaging centers and billing companies to help you get done more in less time.

CureMD’s Meaningful Use resources

Finally, you should begin reporting now as we at CureMD make it easy for you to start. We have a wide variety of resources available to help you report better for Meaningful Use. You can seek help from our Support, Resources and CureWIKI which have a huge library of everything you need to know about the Meaningful Use program.

It may take you some time to meet all the requirements of Meaningful Use, but with CureMD, you are in safe hands as our total Meaningful Use payout exceeds $130 million.

Additionally, we are also holding a webinar which includes everything related to Meaningful Use later in the year. Make sure you are there as we will try to answer all your concerns!