Healthmonix Advisor

The future is here!

This Wednesday, the CMS Innovation Center, in collaboration with the American Academy of Physicians and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, announced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge to predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events.

CMS recently released the 2017 Quality Payment Program Experience Report, which provides an overview of the clinician reporting experience during the first year of the QPP with the intent of helping clinicians, stakeholders, researchers, and others to better understand the program. The report discusses both MIPS and Advanced APMs during the 2017 performance year, breaking the data down into the following four categories:

I speak with many organizations who are planning to report MIPS individually, only for their eligible providers. What they fail to realize is that they can achieve significant additional revenue by reporting as a group for all providers in their practices, even those that are deemed ineligible. In these cases I like to do a simple cost comparison to show what organizations are missing out on, and while each case is unique, the results are often striking.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently proposed a new rule to support the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information (EHI). The proposed rule encourages the adoption of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), which will help allow individuals to securely and easily access structured EHI using smartphone applications. This facilitates a patient's ability to access their health information by requiring that patients be able to electronically access all of their EHI for free. It also implements the information blocking provisions of the Cures Act.

The rule gives seven exceptions to the definition of information blocking (proposed at 45 CFR 171.201–207). If an actor (a healthcare provider, HIT developer, or HIE or network) satisfies one or more exception, their actions would not be treated as information blocking and they would not be subject to civil penalties and other disincentives under the law. These seven exceptions are outlined below (this information based on the CMS fact sheet found here).

Did you know that CMS has a variety of free resources and organizations dedicated to helping clinicians navigate the Quality Payment Program? In today’s blog, we’ll help you understand your options so that when you have a question, you’ll know where to turn. (This is a good one to bookmark for later!)

The CY 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule involves a slew of regulatory changes that will apply to the 2019 performance year. Of course, wading through the final rule to find and understand the most important features of the policy can be grueling; but you’re in luck, because we’ve already done it so you don’t have to! In today’s blog, we’re focusing on how MIPS final scores will be calculated, as well as factors that may lead to reweighting, in 2019.

Since the latest Physician Fee Schedule and Quality Payment Program final rule was released in November 2018, organizations across the country have scrambled to understand key changes that have been made and adapt to their implications. In today’s blog, I want to focus on one change that may well prove significant to billing and Revenue Cycle Management teams: groups of 16 or more can no longer report via claims.

In a recent announcement, CMS Administrator Seema Verma named Dr. Anand Shah, a radiation oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, as the new Senior Medical Advisor for Innovation at CMS.

When the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) was signed into law, it created two distinct pathways for reporting: the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), and the Advanced Alternative Payment Model (Advanced APM). Under MIPS, Medicare Part B payments are tied directly to clinician performance based on Composite Performance Scores (CPS), whereas the Advanced APM track encourages groups of clinicians to take on greater risk (and reward) for cost and quality of care.

In this week’s blog, we’re taking a deep dive into Qualifying APM Participant (QP) and Partial QP Determinations, as laid out in the 2019 QPP final rule.