Top Six Steps to Take for Preparation Now

Taking step now can assist to ease the transition for your practice as the proposed regulations aren’t still final. For further information, use the AMA Payment Model Evaluator to know how to be ready for MACRA and where you require starting. Take a detailed assessment to find where your practice stands under current, but evolving MACRA rules. For improving your measurement and maximizing your rewards at every milestone throughout the payment and care delivery reform procedure, get tips and recommendations.

Taking steps in the following areas can position your practice for victory in the future, whether you finally participate in an APM or MIPS.
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General Considerations

• Evaluate either you’ve $10,000 or less in Medicare charges and 100 or fewer Medicare sufferers yearly. If so, you’re exempt from MIPS participation.
• Determine either your practice meets the needs for small, rural or non-patient- confronting physician accommodations.
• Physicians in a practice of more than one eligible clinician should choose whether to report individually or as a group.
• If you’re not already engaging in a patient clinical data registry, then do contact your specialty society about participating in theirs—data registries can streamline reporting and help with MIPS performance scoring.

MIPS: Resource Use

• To see where improvement can potentially be made, check your Medicare quality and resource use reports (QRURs).
• Consider the CMS’s proposed list of episode groups.
• Recognize your most expensive patient population conditions and diagnoses. Identify targeted care delivery policies for these cases.
• Recognize any internal workflow changes that can be made to support care delivery plans.
• To advance a coordinated care plan (e.g., other specialists to whom you refer patients), identify potential partners outside of you practice.

 MIPS: Quality Measurement and Reporting

• Review the feedback reports of your Medicare Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS). Make certain that you understand your present quality metrics reporting needs and how you’re scoring across both PQRS and private payers. There are few proposed modifications to MIPS quality needs and quality measures while it is expected that the general PQRS requirements will stay similar under MIPS. There are individual measures and specialty-specific measure sets so you have to determine which quality steps you plan to report on.
• The 2014 annual PQRS feedback reports should be accessed and reviewed to see where improvements can be made. The reports on the CMS Enterprise Portal can be viewed by authorized representatives of group and solo practitioners by using an Enterprise Identity Data Management account with the correct role.
• Consider either you plan to report through claims, EHR, clinical registry, qualified clinical data registry (QCDR) or group practice reporting option (GPRO) Web-interface. For physicians in practices of 25 or more eligible clinicians, the GPRO Web-interface is only available.
• Find out local support for your quality improvement tasks. Several local agencies like Practice Transformation Networks give resources and technical support—mostly free of charge—to assist small physician practices to succeed.

MIPS: Advancing Care Information

• If you’ve an EHR, make definite that it is certified EHR technology, which is mostly referred to as CEHRT. Evaluate whether it is 2014- or 2015-edition certified health IT; the version will determine the measures on which you report in the year of 2017.
• Discuss with your vendor about how their product supports latest payment model adoption.
• Consider how to make sure that you can report at least 1 unique patient for each measure of the base score’s 6 objectives. Ideas involve:
  • Reach out to existing sufferers to motivate their use of sufferer portals to view, download and transmit their health information in the year of 2017.
  • Your EHR might permit you to send a secure message through the patient portal to all of your patients at once—if so, and doing so is suitable for your practice, consider sending an appointment reminder to all of your sufferers in the year of 2017.
• Perform a careful security risk analysis in the year of early 2017. Failure to rightly do so will result in a score of 0 (zero) for this category. Your risk analysis should comply with the HIPAA Security Rule needs. The AMA has HIPAA resources to assist you with this step.
• Consider whether there is an extra public health registry to which you can report to get an extra point towards your total Advancing Care Information score.

MIPS: Clinical Practice Improvement Activities

• To evaluate what tasks your practice is already doing and what adjustments it should make to complete additional activities in the year of 2017, review the proposed rule’s list of clinical practice improvement activities (CPIAs).
• The reporting time period for CPIAs is ninety days. Review which ninety days in the year of 2017 would work best for your practice's selected CPIAs.
• Make sure that your certifications and accreditations are current, if you engage in a nationally recognized, accredited patient-centered medical home (PCMH), a Medicaid medical home model, a medical home model, or are recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance as a patient-centered specialty model. Physicians involving in these medical homes gain complete CPIA credit.

Alternative Payment Models

• Determine whether you’re likely to meet the threshold for important participation in an advanced APM, which would make you eligible for incentive payments.
• Make it confirm whether you’re a participant in any of the advanced APMs. If not, contact your specialty society or state medical society to search out if there are APM chances for your practice.
• Evaluate whether 50% of your clinicians utilize certified EHR technology to communicate and document clinical care data.