Inside CHIME: Feb. 9 Was a Great Day for CHIME Members. Here’s Why.

Last week CHIME members scored huge wins in Washington with the passage of legislation that will lessen the burdens we’ve experienced under the Meaningful Use program, expand access to telehealth services and free up $6 billion to combat the opioid epidemic.

One victory in particular has been long in the making for our Public Policy Steering Committee: H.R. 3120, which was designed “to reduce the volume of future electronic health record-related significant hardship requests.” It did so by amending a clause in the original Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that stipulated the Meaningful Use program must be “more stringent over time.”

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has cited that clause when they imposed increasingly stringent Meaningful Use criteria. At the time HITECH was written, that mandate may have seemed like an appropriate way to nudge physicians and health organizations toward more ambitious use of their EHRs. But its authors didn’t anticipate the disconnect between the rapid pace of technological change under these rules and the ability of many providers and hospitals to adjust.

We know many of our members struggled to meet the timelines and requirements under Meaningful Use, forcing them to rely on hardship exemptions to avoid penalties. For our clinicians, the requirement to meet a constant escalation of rules – some considered more of a check list than a clinically relevant measure – was demoralizing and distracting.

For several years, CHIME’s Public Policy Steering Committee has been advocating for Congress to ease burdens that the Meaningful Use escalation has placed on members. Our public policy team in D.C. has pored over thousands of pages of text to follow the twists and turns in regulations. In July 2017, one of us (Cletis Earle) represented CHIME members in testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. We were among only 11 organizations invited to share our insights before the panel on this and several other bills.

Now, six months later, we can all celebrate. This is a big weight off all of our shoulders.

Imagine what we now can do with the time we used to devote to filing hardship exemptions. Imagine having a reprieve from trying to complete EMR upgrades under impossible timelines. Imagine having the bandwidth to give clinicians the digital tools they’ve been clamoring for, and giving them more valuable face-to-face time with their patients.

We made inroads on other fronts, too. Last year CHIME and KLAS jointly released a report that cited lack of reimbursement as a barrier to the adoption of telehealth services. We have been working with policy makers for some time to address that limitation. On Feb. 9 we saw some progress when several IT provisions were signed into law. The provisions expand coverage of telestroke and teledialysis services, allow Medicare Advantage plans to more easily cover telehealth and require the Department of Health and Human Services to study remote health monitoring and connected care.

More recently, we have been pushing for increased awareness of the opioid epidemic that is rocking our country. CHIME created the CHIME Opioid Task Force to help find ways to reduce this devastating disease’s addiction and death rates. We are pleased that the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 includes $6 billion over two years for state grants and public prevention programs, among other things. This commitment is a 400 percent increase over the previous appropriation, and a sign that Congress is taking opioid addiction seriously.

On behalf of the Public Policy Steering Committee, we thank you for your support. We are so pleased to share this good news with you, and we will continue to look out for you in Washington. There are many ways you can get involved at federal, state and local levels, too. Feel free to reach out to the policy team at [email protected] if you have questions. For a good primer, check out CHIME’s CIO Playbook here.

Cletis Earle is the chair of the CHIME Board of Trustees and Liz Johnson is chair of CHIME’s Public Policy Steering Committee.   

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