The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) won't require hospitals to report clinical quality measures electronically in 2014, but two Advisory Board Co. consultants wrote in a recent blog post that healthcare organizations with adequate IT resources should take advantage of the CMS option for electronic reporting next year. Not only will this save them considerable time on manual chart abstraction, but it will also prepare them for the electronic reporting mandate expected after 2014, Robin Raiford and Anantachai (Tony) Panjamapirom wrote. The electronic reporting option for next year is the first step in aligning the reporting of clinical quality measures (CQMs) in the CMS Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program and the EHR incentive program.
