CMS issues API to assist providers understand and select MACRA reporting measures

The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) with Quality Payment Program (QPP) of CMS is coming soon, which needs providers who bill Medicare more than $30,000 in a year to report few performance measures in case to adjust their payments deployed on performance. 

It is a very difficult issue for providers who do not have time to slog through the 2,400 page final rule, sorting out what those measures are and how to report. CMS issued an API targeted at dealing that uncertainty last week.

Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, stated in a statement, “A key part of the Quality Payment Program is to make it simpler and less costly to engage, so clinicians might focus on seeing patients. Both for physicians and the technologists who support them, this 1st release is a step in that procedure.”

In accordance to Steve Daniels, president of Able Health, many providers can select different reporting measures that make sense for them under the Quality Payment Program (QPP).

Daniel says, "A list of all the measures that are utilized across the multiple performance measures is termed as API Dataset. So that involves quality measures, advancing care measures, which are the new iteration of Meaningful Use, and then there is also a category known as improving activities. Providers have to choose which measures they report out of all these measures. There are explanations of the measures along with a list, there is lots of metadata over the measures in regard to what categories and measures CMS considers high priority.”

The 1st app based on the API has been created by CMS itself, known as Explore Measures. In accordance to CMS, it permits users to "choose measures that likely fit their practice, assemble them into a group, and print or save them for reference”.
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Furthermore, a tool using the API called the Able Health MIPS Measures Knowledge Base has been built by Able Health, which is created to make the data about quality measures more searchable and accessible.