Medical Industry News

A proposed federal rule nips and tucks previously issued regulations governing the testing, certification and use of electronic health-record systems.

The proposed rule, issued jointly by the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, tweaks several of the meaningful-use criteria that healthcare providers must meet to qualify for payment under the federal EHR incentive program.

For example, it adds an alternative meaningful-use criterion for the electronic transmission of structured lab results from hospitals to ambulatory-care providers who ordered the lab test.

Under the new alternative criterion, hospitals must send structured electronic clinical lab results to the ordering ambulatory-care provider for more than 20% of total lab orders received from ambulatory providers, regardless of whether the orders were received electronically or by phone, fax or other communications method.

eClinicalWorks EMR Receives ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 Complete EHR Certification

By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer