Our Accomplishments

As part of the 2009 HITECH Act, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provided financial incentives to healthcare providers for the meaningful use of certified electronic health records (EHR) systems. To receive the incentives, physicians and hospitals must demonstrate they are meeting certain requirements of use, ranging from recording patient information as structured data sets to exchanging care records with other providers.

Implementing EHR systems is very challenging for medical practices as such systems are costly and complicated and time-consuming to deploy. Staff must be trained on the new processes. Deployments compete for time that medical practices spend caring for patients.

In 2009, HSSC was awarded a $4.8 million federal grant to help South Carolina’s primary care physicians implement EHR technology and qualify for CMS’ financial incentives. To support the statewide initiative, HSSC established the Center for IT Implementation Assistance (CITIA-SC) to operate a CMS Regional Extension Center.

The HSSC-led effort was hugely successful. CITIA-SC was the second Regional Extension Center in the nation to sign up 1,000 physicians to implement certified EHR systems. By the program’s end, more than 1,200 South Carolina physicians were enrolled. More than 500 physicians met the standards for meaningful use, qualifying for CMS financial incentives.

Additionally, CITIA-SC helped participating physicians receive more than $15 million in Medicaid EHR adoptions. CITIA-SC played a vital leadership role in getting EHR vendors to assist physicians with the process of connecting to the South Carolina Health Information Exchange (SCHIEx), a statewide information system specifically for sharing health information between healthcare providers and state and federal agencies.

As an added bonus, the statewide network of physicians using EHR systems can assist HSSC in securing future federally funded healthcare reform research projects.