The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has issued a new rule aimed at encouraging doctors and hospitals to further their use of electronic health records through federal and state payments.

Stage 2 of the Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record incentive program represents “a massive step forward in advancing the secure exchange of information between providers and patients to support better care across the nation,” says Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. “Getting the right information to the right person at the right time can be a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, anyone who has been a patient or cared for a patient understands that it’s simply not happening today.”

Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, doctors, healthcare professionals, and hospitals can qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments when they adopt, implement, upgrade, or demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology. For those eligible, the payment can reach $44,000 from Medicare and $63,750 from Medicaid.

HHS also hopes the new rule will encourage greater engagement of patients in their own care, says HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

So far, more than 120,000 eligible healthcare professionals and more than 3,300 hospitals have qualified to participate in the program and receive an incentive payment since it began in January 2011, exceeding the agency’s goals.

John Halamka, Chief Information Officer of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wrote on his Life as a Healthcare CIO blog that the rule creates “stretch goals for [electronic health record] vendors, IT departments, and providers, but all are achievable.”

Furthermore, Halamka says, the criteria by which healthcare providers will be evaluated to determine compliance under this second stage of the incentive program is balanced: “The rule lives up the metric first articulated by [former National Coordinator for Health IT] David Blumenthal — the escalator should move up fast, but not so fast that people fall off.”