What do we mean by this?
When we say that we’re dedicated your success, your question might be, “How does MicroMD define your success?” First, we start with the simple words, “Getting you back to the business of healing.” Then, we get a bit more detailed and define what it means to get you back to the business of healing. Our goal is to help minimize the distractions of running a successful independent practice by serving as a trusted adviser and providing dedicated support, adoption-focused training, and innovative functionality, tools, and services to help you achieve challenging outcomes, including:
- Maximizing clinical quality and efficiencies
- Boosting patient engagement
- Managing revenue and profitability
- Optimizing payment programs
- Tracking and reporting for regulatory compliance
- Enabling administrative excellence
- Mitigating risk
- Minimizing cyber threats
Helping you maximize positive QPP payment adjustments and bonuses
While getting you back to the business of healing is our single purpose, the path we take to help you get there may be different. Our Client Success Manager, John Webb, recently reached out to all of our clients to ask what 2017 programs they’ll be participating in, including the CMS Quality Payment Program (QPP). Surprisingly, in response to the QPP, some clients indicated that they either don’t have EMR yet or that they’re planning on accepting the negative payment adjustment. Even more surprising was that a significant number of clients reported that they plan to do the bare minimum to avoid the negative payment adjustment. This is understandable for a practice that may be new to PQRS or the EHR incentive program or for a practice that may be struggling with other practice impacts. Although, for practices that have been actively participating in the EHR Incentive Program, the QPP requirements may not be as daunting as anticipated. CMS is making a good faith effort to ease into the requirements in 2017.
With this said, we’re actively planning communications and support resources to help users maximize participation in the CMS Quality Payment Programs (QPP). Whether you’re participating in the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) or through an advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM), we’ll be working with you to take full advantage of available incentives and bonus payments. I’ve done a lot of research on the MIPS requirements across the Quality, Improvement Activity and Advancing Care Information scoring categories. As you’re probably aware, the quality category doesn’t change much from what providers have already been doing for PQRS. The Improvement Activities category may be new, although many of the options are things practices have been doing all along. What will be required is to create standard operating procedures for managing the selected Improvement Activities and to document that the activities were completed for attestation. The Advancing Care Information Category is the replacement for the onerous EHR Incentive Program requirements. In comparing the sets of requirements, providers need to do significantly less to achieve the base score. Achieving a positive payment adjustment and possibly bonus points may not be a stretch for providers who have already been successfully meeting with EHR Incentive Program Stage 2 requirements.
I urge you to get connected with CMS resources, webinars, the QPP website, etc. And stay tuned for MicroMD resources. You can maximize your participation in the QPP with potentially little more work than your providers have already been successfully managing.
“Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.”
— Swami Sivananda
If you already haven’t read our QPP eBook, Demystifying MACRA, QPP and MIPS download it here.
– Kristen Heffernan
