What is the Meaningful Use Attestation Calculator?

The Meaningful Use Attestation Calculator is an application tool to help Medicare eligible professionals (EPs), Critical Access hospitals (CAHs), as well as other eligible hospitals applying for EHR incentive payments to decide whether they have met the requirements and objectives before the completion of the actual attestation.

With this tool, you’ll enter core and meaningful use information, the calculator will then display whether or not the criteria has been met. The output data can then be printed for your records. Any measures entered that didn’t meet the required usages will be marked in red as ‘failed.’

What does MUA measure?

The objectives are: to measure computerized provider order entry (CPOE) for medication orders directly entered by licensed healthcare professionals, implement drug-to-drug and drug/ allergy controls, the extent of use of ‘eRx’ (the number of electronically- generated and transmitted prescriptions),

How do I use the MUA Calculator?

When using the calculator, it’s important to base your attestation information on the correct billing period for Medicare and Medicaid prescriptions.

If you participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program, the reporting period is 90 days during the first calendar year. After that, the reporting period will cover the whole calendar year.

Participants in Medicaid’s EHR Incentive Program do not have to demonstrate meaningful use during your first year in the program to receive incentive payment until the second calendar year. You then have a 90-day reporting period during that year, with reporting periods for subsequent years during the entire calendar year.

EPs writing less than 100 prescriptions during the reporting period are exempt from this requirement. An example would be chiropractors, who don’t utilize prescriptions medications and therefore don’t use e-prescribing.

Providers can choose from five of the 10 listed Menu Measure objective items to qualify, including from the Public Health list as well as from the Additional Menu.

To save time, I found it was helpful having the following information handy, including:

• The total number of patients having at least one medication order entered using CPOE.
• The number of ‘unique patients’ having at least one medication on the list seen by the EP during the EHR reporting period.
• The number of patients the EP has seen during the EHR reporting period.
• The number of patients with at least one entry as having no known problems recorded in the problem list.
• The number of prescriptions electronically created and transmitted.
• Whether you enabled drug/drug and drug/allergy checks and interactions for the entire reporting period.

As an additional aid to understanding the criteria for meaningful use, more detailed information can be found in the Stage 1 Meaningful Use Specification Sheets are available for eligible hospitals, CAHs and EPs.

Remember that ‘passing’ the calculator application doesn’t automatically guarantee that you’re meeting the program qualification requirements, but it will tell you whether or not you meet the MU requirements. If you ‘fail’, then you will want to review the criteria to be sure data was correctly entered, with the applicable exclusions checked. You can scroll through the CMS to learn why your data didn’t meet the criteria, which will be helpful in determining where you need to revise your data to become eligible.

As a final note, the calculator does not include any Clinical Quality Reporting measures; these will need to be done online during the actual attestation.

At M-Scribe, our years of experience and innovative sevices can help take the guesswork out of EHR and other legislated requirements to ensure compliance and eligibility for payments.

{{cta(‘677eb645-eebd-4c45-a37d-e84cc5d3e4a7’)}}

Image courtesy of centreastrec.org