The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has reported that federal payments to hospitals, physicians, and other eligible professionals for participating in the meaningful use electronic health record (EHR) program reached $12.7 billion on February 28, 2013.
Of this amount, $8.2 billion has been paid to hospitals since 2011. A total of 86% of eligible hospitals in the U.S. are participating in the incentive program, and 3,781 facilities have received payments.
Physicians who enrolled as Medicare eligible professionals have received $2.3 billion, and those enrolled as Medicaid eligible professionals have received $1.3 billion, for a total of $3.6 billion.
A total of 126,456 physicians in the Medicare-eligible-professional program, as well as an additional 57,577 in the Medicaid-eligible-professional program, had received payments by the end of February. Physicians were not categorized by specialty.
Click here to access a summary report of the statistics.
