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EHR Incentive Programs: Helping dentists achieve meaningful use
Author Name Kyle Murphy, PhD | Date February 14, 2013 |

A sizeable amount of money is available to dentists who are eligible for both the Medicaid and Medicare EHR Incentive Programs. So why aren’t they getting it?
When speaking about underserved communities in healthcare, the conversation is generally about treating patients in low-income, rural, or high-risk areas requiring care. When that conversation turns to meaningful use, it centers on the providers who have received less attention from federal and state programs designed to help eligible professionals (EPs) achieve meaningful use as part of the EHR Incentive Programs — specialty providers. And within this category comprising oncologists, ophthalmologists, and other specialists can be found a constituency of providers attracting even less attention in terms of meaningful use — dentists.
“The dental community and for the most part the specialist community have been second-class citizens almost in this whole meaningful use adoption because all the focus was at the primary care level,” says Fred Zolla, CEO and President of iMedicor. “The powers at be decided that would be a good place to start. And they were not wrong, they were right. But now that leaves a whole other community out there — a segment of the market — that also needs help.”
Zolla is speaking of course of the grant programs and funding opportunities established by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). These include the regional extension centers (RECs) created by the Health Information Technology Extension Program to help individual providers and small practices achieve Stage 1 Meaningful Use.
“Considering that primary care is the catalyst that drives healthcare to specialists, more and more of the primary care doctors have been helped by the national HITECH project,” explains Zolla. “We began to understand that the dental community was entitled for those that qualified to receive these incentive funds, but very few knew what to do or what the requirements are.”
As Zolla notes, the problem lies in reaching out to these providers and getting them through the process of achieving meaningful use, which is no different than it is for primary care physicians:

• identify that the EP has 30 percent Medicaid or Medicare patients
• register with CMS and the EHR Incentive Programs
• conduct a practice assessment
• select an appropriate EHR system
• implement the EHR system
• train staff to capture and report data properly
• attest for meaningful use depending on the program

Having recognized a need, Zolla and his team at iMedicor have already begun working with members of the dental community in New Jersey, such as Careington, after having collaborated successfully with the state’s REC, NJ-HITEC, to help primary care provides achieve meaningful use. “What we’ve done is moved out aggressively on the dental side to provide consulting ability that’s really not available to them anywhere else,” says Zolla.
And this is trend he expects to grow as organizations created with HITECH funding consider the future of their operations. As Zolla observes, “A lot of HITECH organizations are looking for ways of becoming self-sustaining as the funding begins to dry up, and one of the ways they’re trying to adjust is to go after the specialty market and charge fees for doing that. That may or may not work.”
Although the deadline for EPs to receive maximum incentives under the EHR Incentive Program for Medicare is nearly upon us (i.e., Feb. 28), a significant amount of money is still on the table for dentists and consultants especially in light of the fact that these providers are eligible for both the Medicaid and Medicare EHR Incentive Programs.