Washington, DC - Steven J. Stack, MD President Elect, American Medical Association - AMA Welcomes Deadline Extension for Meaningful Use Attestation; More Changes Needed:

"The American Medical Association is pleased that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has decided to extend the deadline for eligible providers to attest to Meaningful Use, but is concerned that the program will still face low participation rates without substantial changes to its rigid requirements.

"Only 24 percent of physicians have attested to Meaningful Use for 2014 as of the beginning of February. The deadline extension underscores that the Meaningful Use program is not working and that policymakers need to act on our recommendations to make it more flexible, remove the measures that physicians are having the most difficulty in meeting and revamp the certification program so that electronic health record vendors can innovate to create products that better serve patients and physicians.

"We thank CMS for today's effort and hope that they will go further in addressing the problems with this program when they issue their Meaningful Use rules this spring."