Although the number of hospitals that have received meaningful use incentive payments has increased since 2011, smaller, critical access, publicly owned and nonprofit hospitals have received these payments at a much lower rate, showing that a "digital divide" persists among hospitals, according to a study in Health Affairs.
Researchers examined data from CMS on meaningful use attestation among individual hospitals through the end of 2012. This data was compared with additional information about the hospitals, such as size and location.
Results showed the overall percentage of hospitals receiving incentive payments jumped from 17.4 percent in 2011 to 36.8 percent in 2012. However, the increase in incentive payments was not uniform across all regions and hospital characteristics.
Northeastern hospitals were the most likely to have received a payment in 2012, followed by hospitals in the South. Larger hospitals made larger gains in attestation than their smaller counterparts — the percentage of hospitals with more than 200 beds attesting to meaningful use increased from 23.9 percent in 2011 to 51.2 percent in 2012, whereas hospitals with fewer than 100 beds saw a more modest increase from 14.8 percent to 26.8 percent. Teaching hospitals remained more likely than nonteaching hospitals to have attested to meaningful use by more than a 50 percent margin. Critical access hospitals saw a drop in attestation from 13 percent to 10 percent, and nonprofit hospitals continued to lag behind for-profit hospitals.
The study authors caution penalties for failing to achieve meaningful use, set to go into effect in 2015, will disproportionally affect the hospitals currently struggling with meaningful use and increase the current digital divide.
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