CMS makes landmark announcement on replacing "Meaningful Use" with "Meaningful Outcomes"

With a bombshell announcement earlier this week on stage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference taking place in San Francisco, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is once again taking a major step toward better medical outcomes at a lower cost.

For six years, the $19 billion CMS Meaningful Use program has advanced the adoption of electronic health record technology in the USA. Some say the program has created a gridlock of information technology resources with its complex regulations that confused vendors and CIOs equally.

"The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with something better,” said Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator for CMS, adding: “Since late last year we have been working side by side with physician organizations across many communities - including with great advocacy from the AMA - and have listened to the needs and concerns of many. We will be putting out the details on this next stage over the next few months, but I will give you [the] themes guiding our implementation.”