Bills Address EHR Payments for Multi-Campus Hospitals

A second federal bill seeks to "clarify the application of EHR payment incentives" for multi-campus hospitals in the meaningful use subsidy requirements issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced S. 3708, the Electronic Health Record Incentives for Multi-campus Hospitals Act, late last week. The bill would amend the Social Security Act to "clarify the application of EHR payment incentives" for multi-campus hospitals.

Schumer's bill follows on the heels a week earlier of the similar bill introduced in the House by House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark (D-CA), Rep. Zack Space (D-OH), Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Chairman Frank Pallone  (D-NJ), and Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX).

Both bills would eliminate the provision in the meaningful-use subsidy requirements issued by the Centers for Medicare &; Medicaid Services. This provision treats multi-campus hospitals as a single unit, thereby capping the subsidy it can receive without recognizing the "incremental acquisition, training, and implementation costs" they incur, as the House bill states.

In a letter, the American Hospital Association (AHA) said the Schumer bill it would that would make clear the intent of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health" (HITECH) Act—passed as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—to provide payment incentives in an equitable way to individual hospitals that are part of multi-campus hospital systems."

The letter further stated that the "bill would ensure that payments would be available to all hospitals in a multi-campus system, and that these hospitals could choose the calculation that would best meet the needs of their institutions and communities, either through additional base payments or additional per discharge amounts."

In testimony, before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month, a CMS official told the panel that while CMS had received many comments and requests to recognize each campus of a multi-campus hospital in regard to the incentive payments,  hospitals should not anticipate additional incentive payments beyond what would be paid for one hospital under the "meaningful use" provisions unveiled earlier that month.