Meaningful Use - as we know it - will no longer exist, according to the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt. "Now that we effectively have technology into virtually every place care is provided, we are now in the process of ending Meaningful Use and moving to a new regime culminating with the MACRA implementation," Slavitt said. "The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with some better," he added. The announcement came on Monday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
On December 18, just weeks before the end of 2015, Congress passed its usual Federal Omnibus Government Spending package for the year. Included in this piece of legislation was a certain 2009-page-long document—the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. Luckily for you, I decided to go ahead and do all the grunt work for our readers so that none of you have to read through this monster of a document (FYI—I very nearly froze up my computer trying to download a gigantic PDF file of it, but luckily I found that I could just read it straight off the Congress.gov website instead). To be honest, I quickly figured out that only about nine pages of this cybersecurity law are actually relevant to healthcare providers (the other 2,000 pages… not so much). Out of those nine pages, there are around six main items that healthcare providers need to be aware of from the Cybersecurity Act of 2015:
Whether they were highlights or lowlights, healthcare stories dominated the news in 2015. The skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs, expanded medical coverage, the meltdown of blood-testing startup Theranos and the arrest of pharmaceutical industry entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, criticized for raising the price of life-saving drugs, were some of the stories that took center stage. Last year also saw a continuation of themes, including the (surprisingly quiet) transition to ICD-10, ongoing massive data hacks and the threat of cybersecurity, M&A activity, and the impact of consumerism on the industry. With all this in mind, we give you our top 3 predictions for the New Year:
Prior to the end of the year, medical practitioners received some good news in regard to Meaningful Use. President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Access and Medicare Protection Act, also known as S.2425. According to the White House press release, the law "makes changes to Medicare payments for certain complex rehabilitation technology and radiation therapy services, provide flexibility in applying a hardship exception from meaningful use of electronic health records, and improve Medicare and Medicaid program integrity."
With few days left in 2015, it's often this time where we like to reminise about all of the memories from the prior year. On the Nextech Blog, we've posted a lot of stories in 2015 that cover a wide variety of topics. As we looked through the past year's stories, we've compiled the eight most popular posts on our blog from 2015. One look at the list and you'll notice one predominant theme -- compliance. ICD-10 dominated the conversation on the Nextech Blog in 2015, and while it was a huge story throughout the year, there are certainly other exciting topics covered as well.
With the new year just days away, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) issued its final version of the 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA). The 80-page document acts as a "single resource for those looking for federally recognized, national interoperability standards and guidance," according to a blog post by ONC's Director of the Office of Standards and Technology Steven Posnack, MS, MHS, and Director of HIT Infrastructure and Innovation Division Chris Muir.
To cap off 2015 for Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the $1.8 trillion Omnibus deal that included spending bills and crucial tax breaks for small businesses.While this deal was full of a wide variety of credits, the Section 179 tax break stands out particularly to small medical practices.
Earlier in the year, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee passed an extension of two years for Section 179, which provides small businesses (including healthcare practices) with tax deductions for the purchase or (in some cases) leasing of equipment. This was very good news for owners of small medical practices who may have been hoping to upgrade their equipment in 2015.
