Section 132 of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008 (MIPPA) authorizes a new and separate incentive program for individual eligible professionals who are successful electronic prescribers (e-Prescribers) as defined by MIPPA. This new incentive is separate from and is in addition to the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) program authorized by Division B of the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006. Eligible professionals do not need to participate in PQRI to participate in the E-Prescribing Incentive Program.

Beginning in 2009 and continuing until 2013, Medicare will provide incentive payments to eligible professionals who are successful e-prescribers as defined in MIPPA. Eligible providers who electronically prescribe will receive a 2 percent incentive payment on the Part B billing in 2009 and 2010, 1 percent in 2011 and 2012 and then a .5 percent incentive in 2013. Those not adopting e-prescribing by 2012 will face penalties starting at 1% and will rise to 2% after 2013. If providers take advantage of the ARRA incentives, then they would not continue to receive MIPPA funds after the begin an EMR system. However non-physicin providers (NP's, PA etc.) in the practice can continue to receive MIPPA funds through the end of 2013, since they do not qualify for the ARRA incentives.

As of October 1, 2008 CMS requires that all written Medicaid prescriptions be on a tamper resistant paper. Electronic prescriptions are excluded from this requirement.

What does this mean for you?

If your a provider that bills medicare $400,000 per year in allowable charges, with e-prescribing you can expect to receive an incentive payment in the amount of $8,000 at the 2% incentive rate. That is more than enough to cover the cost of installing the ZipChart e-Prescribing module. And the incentive payment is only half the story. The increased productivity in staffing resources in dependent upon your medicare base of patients, but the availability of medications list for all patients, as well as drug and allergy interactions increased productivity and more importantly quality of care.

What information can I exchange or manage with ePrescribing?

With e-prescribing the medical provider now has a great deal or resources at the click of a stylus. The three main types of information are:

Prescription benefit: Eligibility, benefits and formulary information at your fingertips at the time your writing the prescription. No more phone calls form the pharmacy later that eat up staff resources. With this information at the time of prescribing, you are able to select medications that are on formulary and are covered by the patient's drug benefit. The provider also is made aware of lower cost alternatives such as generic drugs.

Prescription History: Providers can access a timely and clinically sound view of the patient's prescription history across providers as the point of care. This decreases the risk of preventable medication errors.

Prescription Routing: Sending prescriptions with the secure computer -to-computer exchange between your office and pharmacies replaces old error prone procedures. Prescriptions sent direct to the pharmacies computer reduces the risk of medication errors associated with poor hand writing, illegible faxes and manual data entry. And using e-prescribing to process renewals saves you time and money by dramatically reducing the number of phone calls and faxes typically associates with the prescription renewal authorization process.

Here are a few documents prepared by CMS on e-prescribing: