The leading Wound Care and Podiatry EMR received the CMS-standard certification ahead of competitors … again.
As if staying ahead of the curve on regulatory standards and MIPS isn’t enough, Intellicure Inc. announced Monday that it once again passed CMS’s Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) test for its leading wound care and podiatry EHR: IntellicureEHR.
This marks the third time that Intellicure has passed the CEHRT test on its first attempt.
“Some EHRs (Electronic Health Records) claim that achieving the latest certification was a massive development undertaking, but once again, Intellicure passed the certification with ease,” said Intellicure Chief Medical Officer and co-founder Dr. Caroline Fife. “Meeting the rigorous demands of CEHRT testing is not difficult when you start with a platform like Intellicure because we designed it to achieve better healing rates and avoid audits from the very beginning. That’s why we are the EHR chosen by those hospitals and clinicians who value regulatory compliance. We ‘Do the Right Thing’ and we also ‘Do it Right.’”
Beginning in 2019, the clinicians who don’t use an EHR certified to the 2015 standard will be hit financially year after year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Some EHR vendors are taking advantage of confusion around the latest certification by intentionally mislabeling it. One podiatry EHR recently disguised their lack of current certification by saying their software is “2015 compliant” instead of 2015 certified.
Since 2011, CMS has progressively raised the bar on the standards for CEHRT testing. In 2019, practitioners and hospitals must use a 2015 CEHRT to satisfy CMS’s Promoting Interoperability (PI) requirements. Interoperability, which is the electronic exchange of healthcare data, will play an increasingly important role in CMS Quality Payment Programs, particularly the requirements of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). That means the pressure on clinicians to use a compliant EHR like Intellicure has never been greater.
“In the past, physicians could avoid a MIPS negative adjustment to their Medicare fee schedule by simply performing and reporting a few Improvement Activities” said Dr. Jeffrey Lehrman, practicing podiatrist and Principal of Lehrman Consulting, LLC. “But physicians will need to do more in 2019 to avoid a 7% cut to their Medicare reimbursement. One thing they can do to avoid the penalty is to complete the Promoting Interoperability measures using a certified EHR like Intellicure.”
Intellicure has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to governmental regulations and incentives. Intellicure met CMS standards for Meaningful Use 10 years before CMS formalized the concept. In 2014, Intellicure began developing its Quality Suite to help clinicians track their quality care metrics, two years before CMS began requesting those metrics.
“We have been reading the CMS tea leaves correctly for more than a decade. The other podiatry and wound care EHR s have watched what we were doing and then had to run to catch up with us,” Dr. Fife said.
In addition to being one of the few wound care-specific and podiatry-specific EHRs certified to handle PI requirements, Intellicure boasts of several advantages over its competitors:
- Automatic, guaranteed-accurate documentation
- Automatic, guaranteed-accurate ICD-10 coding and E/M levels that maximize physician reimbursements
- The ability to interface with any hospital EHR
- A faster, more natural charting process for practitioners
- DME ordering and automatically generated corresponding documentation from within the chart
- Clinical Decision Support that improves patient care, quality scores and practice efficiency
