Bill to Help Multi-Campus Hospitals Snare Additional EHR Funds

August 3, 2010

Legislation has been filed to that would make multi-campus hospitals eligible for additional grant dollars for funding adoption of electronic health record systems.

The bill, called the “Electronic Health Record Incentives for Multi-Campus Hospitals Act,” would prevent hospitals that have more than one campus sharing a single Medicare provider number from being penalized by a rule recently adopted by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). 

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in 2009, provides information technology grants for hospitals and other providers that make measureable progress towards adoption of EHR.

In the CMS rule, multi-campus hospitals sharing a single provider number would be treated as a single entity, limiting the amount of grant money they could receive. 

Representative Zack Space (D-Ohio) authored the bill with bipartisan support from other members of the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee. 

“Multi-campus hospital systems have incremental acquisition, training, and implementation costs when adopting health IT systems,” said a statement released by Subcommittee Chair Pete Stark (D-Calif.) 

“The legislation clarifies that the health IT incentives in the Recovery Act should address these costs and offers choices for how the campuses receive these incentive payments, reflecting differences between large and small multi-campus hospital systems.”