For many, the end of the year means time off and relaxation. The end of 2014 brought extra stress for our medical group as our Meaningful Use coordinator took an unexpected medical leave three days before the end of our reporting period.

After having previous employees leave us in the lurch, we’ve learned to assume that someone could win the lottery and not come into work the next day. We’ve tried hard to make sure that all of our key roles have a backup person designated to step in. We also have strong policies and procedures regarding documentation to ensure that if we have to replace someone, the potential negatives are minimized. This was a good test of our system. So far, things seem to be working well with just some minor glitches.

Our leadership group had already approved the plans for creating the attestation documentation for Eligible Providers. Those parts of it that could be done in advance were already largely complete. Fortunately, our vendor provided extremely detailed Meaningful Use training with almost ridiculously specific instructions for how to prepare documentation in case of an audit. Although we made fun of it at the time, we’re very grateful for it now because it has allowed us to quickly determine what documentation we have and what we still need for each physician.

Although some people instinctively react to the billions of dollars spent on Meaningful Use and even more specifically to the $44K per Eligible Provider figure as some kind of a windfall for physicians, it doesn’t even begin to cover the amount of money needed to actually install, maintain, and optimize the software needed to qualify. It doesn’t pay for the lost productivity while we check boxes that don’t assist us clinically, either. For our group of several hundred providers, it also requires multiple full-time staff members to train, report, retrain, track, analyze, and educate so that we don’t miss our goals.

We’ve definitely been hurt by the fact that Meaningful Use is all or none. Last year, we had a couple of providers who were really close, but failed on one or two measures, which results in an unsuccessful attestation. We redoubled our efforts around those providers and it looks like they’re going to be successful this year.

Still, my office is now full of hundreds of individual physician binders, ready to receive the rest of the attestation documentation as it becomes available. I wound up as the lucky repository for it since my office is a converted conference room and I’m in it only rarely. I didn’t think much of it initially, but now that I sit here looking at all the work in progress, I think about how many hundreds of hours of staff and physician time have been taken up trying to chase the MU money and avoid future penalties. I can’t help but think that it hasn’t been worth it.

As employed physicians, most of my colleagues don’t have a choice whether to participate or not. As …read more