Quote to Note - Meaningful Use EHR Programs Over: It’s about Time.

Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS,  says the Meaningful Use Programs are effectively over,  as posted in the CMS blog and tweets

"As any physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are real. Programs designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that people who build these programs just don't get it.”
 

"The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with something better."

“We are moving CMS away from rewarding providers for the use of technology and toward the outcome they achieve with their patients."

 "We are requiring open APIs in order that  the physician desktop can be opened up and move away from the lock that early EHR decisions placed on physician organizations. That will allow apps, analytic tools, and connected technologies to get data in and out of an EHR securely."

"Providers will be able to customize their goals so tech companies can build around the individual practice needs, not the needs of the government. Technology must be user-centered and support physicians, not distract them."

To which physician organizations replied by saying, in essence, “It’s about time CMS listened to physician complaints  that Meaningful Use programs for EHRs  wasted time and money in clinical practices, distracted from patient care, and did not advance quality.”