According to Modern Healthcare, “Dr. Farzad Mostashari will step down this fall as head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, where he’s had a big hand in guiding federal health IT policy for the past four years, including the challenging rollout of meaningful-use rules for electronic health-record systems.” This might sound out of blue, but there’s a reason we’re sharing this–Mostashari brought the phrase “meaningful use” into existence.
Read the complete article here. It reports that Mostashari’s program, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was able to dole out $15.5 billion to hospitals, office-based physicians and other eligible professionals. Evidently, more than 80% of hospitals and 58% of physicians and other professionals were reimbursed under the program for “adopting, implementing, upgrading or meaningfully using a federally certified EHR system.” There’s a late night joke in here somewhere. We don’t want to offend anyone’s taste, but here it is: So we heard half of doctors made money thanks to meaningful use. That’s right. The other half are still figuring out how to turn their EMR on.
Drum roll…
Image courtesy of hhs.gov