Physician e-Prescribing Hardship Exemptions

While the penalties related to lack of e-prescribing compliance have not received a lot of notoriety as of yet, they are just around the corner. FierceHealthIT breaks down the new proposed exemptions from CMS in the following post:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed giving physicians additional “hardship” exemptions that will prevent them from being penalized by Medicare for not prescribing electronically this year. The only catch is that the proposed rule won’t be finalized until sometime after July 25, when the comment period ends. With a deadline for obtaining an exemption set for Oct. 1, doctors will have roughly two months to apply for an exemption.

Under CMS’ current regulations for its e-prescribing incentive program, which started paying bonuses to doctors in 2009, physicians who do not e-prescribe face a 1 percent reduction in their Medicare payments in 2012. To avoid that penalty, they must show they ordered at least 10 prescriptions on an e-prescribing system between January 1 and June 30 of this year.

Are you compliant with the e-prescribing standard? If not, do you expect this to be a problem?

Read the full story HERE

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