Physicians must check online to learn whether they should report quality data for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) for 2018, under a just-announced change to the process. In 2017, the first year of MIPS reporting under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) notified providers by mail of their status in January. Clinicians had been waiting for a similar email this year.
Also this year, clinicians must report a full 12 months of quality data, compared with nine months for 2017. That, along with CMS’ late rollout of the eligibility lookup tool, means some practitioners could end up incurring extra expenses to make sure their electronic health records systems (EHRs) track and report data from the first quarter of 2018.
AMA president David Barbe, MD, told Modern Healthcare in an April 10 story that the AMA had significant concerns that physicians would be held to full-year reporting requirements, even though CMS did not release the information until April.
According to CMS, about 934,000 clinicians will be exempt from reporting MIPS data, including those who have less than $90,000 in Medicare revenue or treat fewer than 200 Medicare patients a year.
More information on eligibility and a direct link to the MIPS participation status lookup tool is available online. You must enter your 10-digit National Provider Identifier (NPI) to obtain results.
The full Modern Healthcare article is online.