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Final MU 2 Rules Will Significantly Ratchet Up Vendor Costs
The AHA shares my concerns. "there are many activities that need to happen before we will have certified products that can be purchased and installed by providers, hospitals, and physicians," says Chantal Worzala, AHA director of policy.
Each year, providers must confirm that their software is still in compliance with current Meaningful Use guidelines, and that's adding to the squeeze on providers to implement and vendors to facilitate those implementations.
In its comments to ONC this spring, AHA tried to allow any provider currently certifying at the 2011 Meaningful Use guidelines to stay on that release of software until it moved to the Stage 2 set of Meaningful Use functions.
But ONC refused to introduce this level of complexity into the regulations. While I can't blame ONC for trying to keep a complex set of regulations a little bit simpler, the result is that all providers have to get updated software from their vendors at once, whether they're in attesting at 2014-level Stage 1 or Stage 2.
"The notion that they're putting everybody into that upgrade cycle in the same year absolutely is problematic," Worzala says.
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Comments are moderated. Please be patient.
flpoggio (8/28/2012 at 2:15 PM)
I just got off the Friday NeHC webinar and when asked this same question the only answer was "we don't know a specific date' and "they will trickle out thru December 2012. That means vendors will have maybe the first paret of next year to modify and test their software. And assuming you would want it running for at least 3 months before the start of 2014...that's a very tight tight schedule. There no doubt will be a massive number of upgrades happening around 9/2013. My advice - don't get admitted to a hospital betw Sept and Dec 2013.