Rural Health Programs

Courses are approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). They are offered online & on campus through Bellevue College and Spokane Community College. For course descriptions and registration see Bellevue College and Spokane Community College.

May 13, 2010 – Washington’s Medicaid program will receive a large amount of money in federal matching funds for electronic health records planning. This planning is necessary to begin the electronic health record incentive program. This program was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. On Tuesday CMS announced that Washington will receive about $967,000 for EHR planning work. The federal stimulus law provides a 90% federal match for state planning activities. Its purpose is to manage incentive payments to Medicaid providers. The hope is that these incentives will encourage participation in statewide EHR efforts. The goal is to promote the purchase of EHR systems that are compatible with each other. This in turn will help doctors meet "meaningful use" standards for EHR technology statewide.

April 15, 2010 – President Obama recently signed H.R. 4851 into law. One section of the bill fixes a problem with incentive payments for electronic health records. The previous version would have prevented thousands of physicians from qualifying for the payments.

When these payments were first approved in the Economic Recovery legislation, the bill excluded "hospital-based" doctors. CMS interpreted "hospital-based" to include doctors working in Rural Health Clinics that were owned by hospitals.

This new legislation makes it clear what types of doctors are "provider-based." Doctors who provide substantially all of their services in a hospital outpatient setting will be eligible for these incentive payments, presuming they are able to meet all of the incentive payments requirements.

CMS is expected to publish the final criteria for EHR meaningful use by late June or early July and the new legislative directive will be reflected in the final rule.

Click here for a summary of the bill. See (Sec. 5). The White House Press Secretary confirmed that the President had signed the bill into law on April 15, 2010.

January 21, 2009 - According to the National Association of Rural Health Clinics (NARHC), all agencies are to cease work on all proposed rule changes until the new Administration has had an opportunity to review the work. As a result, no further work on the RHC rule will take place in CMS until the review is complete.

NARHC plans to seek meetings with the new officials to express their views on the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed changes.