E-Prescribe

Does anyone know when Medicare will be paying the e-prescribe bonus for 2009?

No dates given

But we just got the 2008 payment for PQRI so expect the 2009 payment in October/November 2010.

Congratulations on successful PQRI reporting

That's a real accomplishment.

Do you think it cost you more to do than you got as a bonus? I'm a strong supporter of reporting.

Reporting was easy

I could write on and on about PQRI but I picked the 4 easiest measures I could find and used those. In 2008 I picked challenging ones and got frustrated that I was reporting a lot of "Poor diabetes control" due to patient adherence, medication costs, etc so 2009 got ""asked about smoking", administration of pneumovax, Aspirin for CAD and urine testing in DM.

So the effort was filling out a cheat sheet on each Medicare patient and my receptionist entering the codes on the billing screen of our EMR. The payoff was $1,600. Good return I'd say! And if I spent less time on codapedia and doing administrative work and saw more patients or was a specialist it would have been a bigger check.

I also reported the use of e-prescribing in 2009 so that doubles my bonus!

And finally remember it is pay for reporting NOT pay for performance. Why not participate????