Is Medical Assisting Governed by State Law or Federal Law?

Like most other health professions, medical assisting is governed primarily by state law. This is due to the wording of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Because the power to regulate professions and occupations is not delegated to the United States Congress in Article I of the Constitution, it remains within the sovereign authority of each state. This authority includes establishing education and credentialing prerequisites for the practice of a profession, delineating legal and ethical responsibilities for the professionals, and issuing and enforcing disciplinary standards for breaches of these responsibilities.

Therefore, the legal scope of practice of medical assistants (which is coterminous with the legal authority of licensed health care providers to delegate to medical assistants) is established by state legislation, regulations and policies of state boards that regulate health professionals who delegate to medical assistants, and common law principles arising from court decisions and usual and customary practice. Federal law, however, sometimes impacts medical assisting scope of practice. The meaningful use regulations of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are a current and significant example. Federal statute and CMS rule require a certain percentage of medication/prescription, laboratory, and diagnostic imaging orders to be entered into the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system by licensed health care professionals or “credentialed medical assistants” in order for a licensed eligible professional to receive incentive payments under the Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program.

Addressing Recent Concerns About Order Entry

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Blog recently posted these articles dealing with forthcoming changes to the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs:

EHR Incentive Programs: Where We Go Next

Comments of CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt at the J.P. Morgan Annual Health Care Conference, Jan. 11, 2016

In the wake of these pieces, there has been some concern about the potential effects on medical assistants’ ability to enter orders into the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system for meaningful use purposes. I have addressed these concerns in a memorandum to AAMA leaders. The body of this message is as follows:

January 22, 2016

Within the last 10 days the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued statements about forthcoming changes in the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs (Incentive Programs) required by the passage of the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization Act of 2015, referred to as “MACRA.”

Congress enacted MACRA on April 16, 2015.  This legislation replaces the current meaningful use (MU) payment adjustment provisions with the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), effective January 1, 2019.  According to CMS, MIPS will incorporate some meaningful use elements of the current program and will introduce new elements.

There has been a groundswell of concern that MACRA will do away with the requirement that only third-party-credentialed medical assistants, licensed health care professionals, and third-party-credentialed individuals “who hold a more specific title than ‘medical assistant’ because their duties include only parts of the medical assisting scope of practice, or because of the specialization of the overseeing eligible professional (EP),” are permitted to enter medication, laboratory, and diagnostic imaging orders into the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system for meaningful use calculation purposes under the Incentive Programs.

In my legal opinion, this concern is not warranted because of the following:

1. The order entry credentialing requirement of the Incentive Programs was established by CMS rule, not by federal statute.
2. No provisions of MACRA impact the CMS order entry credentialing requirement.
3. The legislative history of MACRA does not indicate that Congress was concerned about the CMS order entry credentialing requirement.

CMS regulations implementing MACRA and MIPS are scheduled to be published for comment in 2016.  I do not anticipate that these forthcoming regulations will include any changes to the credentialing requirement of the CMS MU order entry rule.  However, if changes are proposed that could potentially harm patients by lowering the credentialing requirement for medical assistants who enter orders into a CPOE system, the American Association of Medical Assistants will be quick to point this out to CMS decision makers, and to persuade them to maintain or increase the current requirement.

Video: “How Medical Assistants Can Meet the CMS Meaningful Use Requirement”

Below is a video of my presentation at the AAMA 58th Annual Conference in St. Louis, in which I discussed order entry into the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system and answered questions about the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements.

The video can also be accessed through the AAMA YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4avFT3XZE

CMS Audits as Safeguards Against Fraudulent Order Entry

In the continuing discussion about computerized provider order entry (CPOE), a frequent question concerns whether a noncredentialed health care professional could circumvent any safeguards and perform order entry into an electronic health record (EHR) system. As Rob Antony of CMS stated last year, it is indeed possible to do this. However, that possibility is one of the primary reasons for CMS audits, which could identify and penalize such behaviors. A standard EHR system would maintain a log of which staff members enter orders. Any practice found violating the requirements for order entry could be subject to financial penalties. The full text and video of Mr. Anthony’s statement follows:

“There’s not a requirement as part of certification that your certified EHR has to identify you as [a] credentialed [medical assistant]; there’s actually not a requirement within certification that you have to be identified as anything. However, for purposes of entry, for purposes of workflow, the [eligible professional] and the practice [have] to make sure that’s who is entering that information. We realize that not every EHR may have that information, but certainly a large number of them do, and I can anticipate that an auditor would ask for that log.”

***

“We don’t actually have any additional regulatory authority beyond what we have with incentive payments and payment adjustments, specific to this program for CPOE. It is possible for anyone to game the system here. That’s why an auditor might look at credentialing and would look at those audit logs to see whether or not that was likely to have happened. The authority here, or the clout, Is either if an auditor goes through and discovers that people were erroneously counted within a numerator and you did not actually meet meaningful use, you would forfeit an incentive payment, and then potentially [it would] be applied [to] the payment adjustments. So certainly if an auditor comes by afterward and discovered that your attestation was not correct, then it would be a forfeit of payment or a recoup of payment, and potentially things that are egregious fraud get sent for additional prosecution.”

Expired Credentials and Meaningful Use

I have been receiving questions about whether a medical assistant who formerly held the CMA (AAMA) credential is considered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to be a “credentialed medical assistant,” and is permitted to enter medication, laboratory, and radiology orders into the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system for “meaningful use” calculations under the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Programs.

First of all, it is important to understand that the policy of the Certifying Board of the AAMA states that only a current CMA (AAMA) is permitted legally to use the initialisms “CMA” or “CMA (AAMA),” and the phrases “Certified Medical Assistant” or “certified medical assistant.” Anyone other than a current CMA (AAMA) who does so is violating the intellectual property rights of the American Association of Medical Assistants.

Because an individual whose CMA (AAMA) is not current cannot use the credential for any purpose, such an individual is not a “credentialed medical assistant” according to the CMS rule, and cannot enter orders into the CPOE system and have such entry count toward meeting the meaningful use requirements. The individual must recertify and make current the CMA (AAMA) credential in order to meet the CMS definition of a “credentialed medical assistant.”