CMS Gives $43 Million to HP for EHR Incentive Program Assistance
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have awarded HP Enterprise Services, a division of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard, a $43 million, five year contract to continue providing information management, maintenance and integration to assist the EHR incentive programs.
This partnership has been ongoing since 2010. HP has maintained the CMS Integrated Data Repository (IDR) database, which is a huge part of the agency’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) strategy. The IDR is an integrated data environment that contains Medicare claims, as well as beneficiary, provider and plan data, and houses more than 16 billion records used for determining incentive payments to doctors and hospitals via EHR, fraud waste and abuse (FWA) research, and other healthcare-related analytics.
Accurate Medicare payment data is needed for the agency to allocate payments for eligible healthcare professionals and hospitals under EHR incentive programs created by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.
HP also will provide troubleshooting support for new and existing IDR users while providing an operational environment inclusive of database administration and extract, transform and loads (ETL). These will help the agency's fraud-fighting efforts by aggregating data sources used to identify FWA and significantly increase the quantity of data within the IDR.
