If you don't have enough households in your county at 4 Mbps (megabits per second) Internet service, you can skip a couple of meaningful use measures.
In a tweet from @CMSGov on Feb. 10, CMS announced, "Eligible Professionals: Learn about 2016 program requirements under #EHR Incentive Programs in new tipsheet..."
The tipsheet clarifies earlier sub-regulatory guidance on broadband, such as this Aug. 18, 2014, FAQ addition, "I am an eligible professional. What should I do if my patients don’t have broadband access?"
Referring to meaningful use incentive program objective 8 (Patient Electronic Access, the patient-portal, view-download-transmit objective) and objective 9 (Secure Electronic Messaging), CMS said at that time:
An eligible professional that conducts 50 percent or more of his or her patient encounters in a county that does not have 50 percent or more of its housing units with 3 Mbps broadband availability, according to the latest information available from the FCC, on the first day of the EHR reporting period may exclude the second [portal] measure of the Patient Electronic Access objective and the Secure Electronic Messaging objective.
The new tipsheet expands on this: While it repeats the "50 percent or morer" exception in both cases, it ups the required broadband rate from 3 Mbps to 4 Mbps.
Interestingly, the Federal Communications (FCC) abandoned 4 Mbps (more specifically, 4 Mbps download/1 Mbps upload) as a broadband standard last year, updating its broadband benchmark speeds to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps. "The 4 Mbps/1 Mbps standard set in 2010 is dated and inadequate for evaluating whether advanced broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way," FCC reported on Feb. 4, 2015.
The new tipsheet also lists six counties in Alaska, Idaho, Texas, and Utah "which do not have the 4 Mbps of Broadband download speed, and therefore qualify for the broadband access exclusion." But it's unclear whether these are the only counties in which you might qualify: CMS also directs users to FCC's National Broadband Map so providers can "search, analyze, and map broadband availability in their area."
Presumably eligible professionals will still need to submit a hardship exception application. The current application deadline for 2017 is March 15.
More at Part B News soon.