What are the penalties associated with a lack of using an electronic medical records application?

What are the penalties associated with a lack of using an electronic medical records application?

Two Kinds of Penalties associated with a lack of compliance or application in using electronic medical records:

1) Reduction of Incentive Rewards:

For medical providers who were doing meaningful use of electronic medical records, it is known that they were given plenty of financial incentives. Early adopters to the compliance of electronic use of medical records were receiving higher incentives and so providers who began in 2011 were eligible for reward money of up to $44,000. And most of these providers utilized the incentive rewards for payment for new IT systems and software. While the ones who were slow in implementing the electronic use for medical records received reduced amounts of incentives. Those who started in 2014 were qualified to receive only $24,000. And take note that those payments was stretched out for a period of several years from 2011 to 2016. By not getting the money, providers most probably had a hard time to address the expenses of improving their medical record systems to comply

with the requirement.

2) Reduced Medicare Reimbursement:

It was in a way heartbreaking, when Medicare eligible providers did not follow or comply with EMR requirement by January 1, 2015, which resulted to reimbursement deduction of Medicare claims by 1% yearly. The downgrading or reduction in inclusion went on each year that the provider did not show/do compliance, up to 2017, where the penalty increment leaped to 3%. In other words, the penalties started by 1 percent reduction in 2015, then the reimbursement reduction became 2 percent in 2016 and 3 percent in 2017, consecutively.