The patient was brought in on a stretcher, in critical condition and the on-call surgeon was paged to the ICU. The EMTs and nurses updated the physician that the patient had been hit and drug by a truck along the highway for at least 30 feet. The patient's left lung had collapsed, the patient was unresponsive and the head trauma looked severe. The physician spent a few minutes looking over the patient and then proceeded to pull shards of glass and bits of rock out of the patient's superficial wounds on his legs until the patient expires. 

Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? It's a great thing for the patients that most physicians are so much better at medicine than they are business because if most physicians practiced medicine the way they run their business, we as patients would be in real trouble. What I am talking about is the massive urgency that so many physicians are concentrating on to achieve Meaningful Use. The main objective by almost every one of them is to qualify to get the $44,000 bonus (if they achieve it for five full years), so let's look at that for a minute or two. 

$44,000 / 5 years = $8,800 a year 

$8,800 / 12 months = $733.33 a month 

$733.33 / 4.3 weeks = $170.54 a week 

$170.54 / 5 days = $ 34.10 a day 

It seems like it would be alot easier to adopt even one of the things I've been telling folks about to get 25 times the $34.10 a day and there would be no doubt you would get it. 

Yep - you folks are going to alot of trouble for $34.10 a day (that's what it will average out to over 5 years, by the way) 

So let's look at the maximum you can get from MU per year:


So - if you started last year, the maximum you can get in MU is $44K - but that means you get $18,000 this year, $12K next year, $8K in 2014, $4K in 2015 and your check in 2016 from meeting it in 2015 will be $2,000. 

If you start this year, you can max out at $44K - just putting the checks one year later 

if you don't start till 2013 - you'll max out at $39K and if you wait until 2014, then you'll only max out at $24K. 

So - $18,000 this year. That sounds better. Let's look at this year. 

$18,000 / 12 = $ 1500 per month 

$ 1,500 / 4.3 = $ 348.83 per week

$ 348.83 / 5 = $ 69.76 a day 

And if you get the Hydrostat I sell and do just one Hydrostat on a patient with GERD or abdominal pain or flatulence a day, you make a net of $73.10 per day and that takes about 4 minutes of a staff's time. If you do one Annual Wellness Visit on a Medicare patient per day and you use my test to determine cognitive level, you make $211 per day for your nurse spending about 25 minutes with a patient. 

OK - My innerds are not getting real tickled about Meaningful Use yet. Forgive me. 

And, if you're going after the Medicaid MU instead, you should know that the Medicaid incentives will be paid by the States, but the timing will vary according to State - and if you're in a state that has given away all of their money, like California - do you really expect them to have any money to pay MU? 

Folks - don't get me wrong. You need to do it as it is money that the Congress put our grandchildren into further debt for and it's already borrowed money that we have to pay interest on, whether you take it or not (if you don't take it - they'll spend it on something else) - so you should get it because you deserve it.