How to Participate in MIPS Efficiently

At this point it’s highly unlikely that anyone in the healthcare industry is unfamiliar with MIPS. Yet even though this program has been in operation for the last several years, many providers may find themselves struggling with participating in a way that doesn’t feel disruptive. In this blog post, we will explore three ways to increase your efficiency for MIPS participation. Let’s get started.

What is MIPS and why is it important?

MIPS refers to the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, a program that determines Medicare payment adjustments. Providers are given a composite performance score that determines whether they receive a payment bonus, a payment penalty, or no payment adjustment at all.

In this program, providers report on measures and activities from a certain performance period. From there, CMS analyzes the submitted information and calculates scores in four categories: quality, improvement activities, promoting interoperability, and cost. The scores from each of those categories are combined to make up the final MIPS score, which determines the provider’s payment adjustment for Medicare Part B claims.

MIPS is important due to its connection to quality and cost-efficient care. Additionally, MIPS helps to drive improvements in health outcomes and care processes, increase the use of health information, and reduce the cost of care.

3 Ways to Efficiently Participate in MIPS

Between the financial impact for your practice and the impact on patient care, MIPS participation is an important task. Streamlining this task to be as efficient as possible will help your practice to have MIPS success without a major disruption to your daily operations. Here are three ways to efficiently participate in MIPS:

1. Use an EHR with the appropriate level of certification. There are many factors that should be considered when choosing an electronic records solution, but one of the most important for providers who are participating in MIPS is the solution’s certification. In order to successfully participate in MIPS, your EHR must be certified to the current requirements. As of 2024, this means using a software that is 2015 CURES Edition certified.
2. Make sure to document encounters thoroughly. In order to track all of the metrics and activities that you may be scored on for MIPS, it’s important to create detailed documentation. An efficient EHR, capable of tracking metrics and MIPS activities as part of the normal encounter documentation will allow you to focus on patient care, while letting the EHR track the necessary metrics.
3. Invest in an end-to-end reporting service. MIPS participation, when done manually, can be incredibly time consuming. While a certified EHR can track metrics on its own, using a MIPS reporting software that integrates with your EHR, can help to automate data extraction, selection of quality measures, calculation, and benchmarking, as well as submission of data, to help you achieve your best scoring outcome with less manual work on the part of your staff.

While this certainly isn’t the first year for MIPS participation for many providers, it can still feel like a difficult undertaking. Creating efficiencies where possible will allow providers to be more successful in their participation while also minimizing frustration.

MicroMD understands the importance of efficient MIPS participation, and that’s why we strive to make our simple, customizable, and connected, 2015 CURES Edition certified, MicroMD EMR easy to use and streamlined for MIPS participation. Additionally, we are proud to offer Alpha II through Solutions Central, an end-to-end MIPS reporting service that automates participation for those practices that want to leverage technology in order to allow more time to focus on patient care.

Are you interested in learning more or getting started? Visit micromd.com or call 1-800-624-8832 today.