CMS inaugurates new online tool for the Clinicians’ convenience

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has today issued a new online tool to share automatically electronic data for the Medicare Quality Payment Program. This recent release is the 1st in a series that will be the active part of ongoing attempts of CMS to spur the development of creation, innovative, customizable tools to decrease the burden for clinicians, while also encouraging high-quality care for patients.
CMS published the Quality Payment Program website in the month of October, an interactive site to assist  the clinicians to understand the program and successfully engage. Today’s release, usually termed as an Application Program Interface (API), builds on that site by making it convenient for other agencies to retrieve and maintain the Quality Payment Program’s measures and enable them to create applications for clinicians and their practices. The API, present at qpp.cms.gov/education, will permit developers to write software utilizing the information explained on the Explore Measures section of QPP.cms.gov. CMS created the Explores Measures tool after conducting interviews with clinicians, which enables clinicians and practice managers to choose measures that likely fit their practice, assemble them into a group, and print or save them for reference. Tens of thousands of individuals are utilizing this tool already.
 “The release of API today will sustain the focus of CMS on user-driven design by offering developers and our partners the chance to turn our information into strong applications. CMS is devoted to collaborating with the agencies that doctors trust to make their lives simpler, while motivating their efforts to improve the quality of care across America”, said Dr. Kate Goodrich, Director of the CMS Centers for Clinical Standards and Quality.
According to Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, a significant part of the Quality Payment Program is to make it easier and less costly to participate, so clinicians might concentrate on seeing patients. This 1st release is a action in that process, both for physicians and the technologists who motivate them.
The release of this information has been acknowledged by many groups, involving: the American Academy of Ophthalmology, American College of Radiology (ACR), the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NHRI), National Rural Accountable Care Consortium, Great Lakes PTN, American College of Physicians (ACP), Pacific Business Group on Health, Compass PTN, TMF QIN-QIO, and the Mountain Pacific Quality Health Foundation.
The Quality Payment Program is modernizing and advancing Medicare to pay smarter for better care through streamlined policy and better technology and operations. This Program has been created to mitigate reporting burden on clinicians so that they can concentrate and focus on their patients, while also giving helpful information to clinicians and other stakeholders, so that overall care quality improves. CMS will sustain to release information and APIs to spur innovation and keep participants up-to-date as the program and its supporting website mature.
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For more information about the API Swagger documentation, please visit:https://qpp.cms.gov/api/