Opinion: Meaningful Use EHR audits: When, not if

Regardless of how much clinicians complain about their EHRs, if a hospital or medical practice accepts federal money to put them in place, it must prove it's using these electronic tools in a meaningful way, as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The CMS is performing pre-payment and post-payment audits on 5-10% of healthcare providers, choosing some of them randomly and others based on a CMS risk profile of suspicious or anomalous data. It's easy to get complacent when there's only a one in 10 chance of being audited, but that statistic is misleading. If 10% of all incentive recipients are audited in 2014, another 10% in 2015, and so on, eventually your organization will be targeted.