Good news! In 2011, the first year you are eligible to get up to $18,000 in EMR stimulus money, all you need to do is use a certified EMR for 90 consecutive days in 2011 and simply attest (sign a form) to meaningful use. For subsequent years, however, reporting meaningful use will most likely be through the PQRI program.
If you don’t already know, PQRI stands for Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, and has been around for three years. It is a system of reporting, through additional claim form codes, that certain events have occurred during patient care that point to quality case management. Currently Medicare offers a 2% bonus incentive for using the program, which could equate to a few thousand extra dollars for those chiropractors who treat a significant Medicare population.
Yes, PQRI should eventually save tax payer money and improve quality, but at what cost? As far as I can tell, the ultimate goal of the HITECH act (EMR govt. stimulus) is to collect data, mountains of it, run statistics, and decide what procedures should be allowed for which diagnoses.
The problem I have, lies in the fact that statistics are highly subjective; meaning results can be widely interpreted to support just about any conclusion. There exists the very real possiblility that wonderful therapies will be deemed inappropriate, thus non-covered, with the stroke of a political pen. I don’t need to go into detail on who politicians work for. (hint: its not patients!)
Never the less, PQRI is not going away, so its better to understand and use it (fingers crossed) to our advantage. I plan to research the ins and outs of PQRI in the coming weeks so chiropractors are able to seamlessly engage Medicare in the future.
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This article is a perfect example of the omnibus research on chiropractic and cost effectiveness. The data was there that showed more people used chiropractic after Medicare trained them to come to a DC for all NMS conditions. My question is how could it not be more expensive that previous data visits to chiropractors? This is BAD statistics and that report should be thrown out. The question should have been asked does DC care vs. MD care for NMS conditions save medicare money. It should then have added in hospital care, ER visits, medication costs, adverse reaction costs, complications from medications and injections vs. DC costs. This study only looked at previous DC cost to medicare vs. current cost following the study.
Also the standard deviation in some of the data should have been thrown out because Illinois data is Too disimilar! Drug companies never hesistate to throw out data so why didn’t the government. Anyway I agree with this article. At this point the government is not interested in Chiropractic because they published that article indicating there is no savings, when it just doesn’t make any sense.
So perhaps we can do one thing in the future. Have a minimum that the government must pay us and it can’t be under $30 per adj. Secondly they must pay us for outcome assessments that they want, and thirdly pay us for Radiographs – it saves money vs. hospital cost. Finally we should be able to opt out of medicare if we choose.
That’s just my 2 cents.