Medicare Distributes $75M in Meaningful Use Incentive Payments

For the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program, providers will follow a similar process using their state's Attestation System. Check here to see states' scheduled launch dates for their Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs: http://www.cms.gov/apps/files/statecontacts.pdf

Do you have questions about the EHR Incentive Programs? Do you want to find out if you are eligible, how much of an incentive payment you can earn, and learn more details about the program and what you need to do to qualify?

• Visit our Path to Payment page for a program overview
• Visit our Meaningful Use page  

The U.S. market for electronic health records is expected to reach about $6 billion by 2015, up from about $2.2 billion in 2009, according to a report from research and consulting firm MarketsandMarkets, Healthcare IT News reports.

The report predicts that the EHR market will experience a compound annual growth rate of about 18.1% through 2015, partially driven by federal initiatives to expand EHR adoption.

According to the report, more than 1,000 EHR vendors occupy the market. In 2010, Allscripts led the EHR market for physician offices with 15.7% of the market share, while MEDITECH led the hospital EHR market with 24.9% of the market share (Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 6/14).

The report also noted that:

• Hospitals and larger health systems typically use client-server based EHR systems;
• Web-based EHR systems are gaining in popularity among smaller health care practices because of lower implementation costs; and
• The development of interoperable EHR systems is one of the largest focus areas for health IT vendors (Herman, Becker's Hospital Review, 6/14).