With the reimbursement for use of EMR systems comes some paperwork responsibility that will need to be performed by hospitals, group practices and individual physicians who received EMR incentive checks in the past years. The hospitals and providers that received checks from the government for EMR services now must document their use of EMR, according to this Fierce Healthcare story. Garden City, N.Y.-based accounting firm of firm of Figliozzi and Company has begun auditing recipients of EMR checks one behalf of the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS).
The audits have been conducted after the Government Accounting Office (GAO) indicated that CMS's use of automatic checks for meaningful use requirements was not satisfactory to meet the requirements of the original law. At this time there hasn't been reaction from major associations but it's likely these compliance costs will add at least slightly to the burden of implementing EMR.
Kalorama's report on this topic can be found here.
