Practice Perfect
Is Your Practice on Track With 2022 MIPS?
By Chris McDonagh, Senior Editor, EyeNet
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Want to avoid a payment penalty of up to 9%? You are on the right track if you can answer “yes” to these three questions: Does your practice have a primary point person for the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS)? Are staff allotted enough time each month to stay on top of MIPS? Are they using the free MIPS resources provided by the Academy and the American Academy of Ophthalmic Executives (AAOE)?
Stay on Top of MIPS
Use the QPP Participation Status Tool. Go to https://qpp.cms.gov/participation-lookup. Next, enter a clinician’s 10-digit National Provider Identifier to find out whether he or she is a MIPS eligible clinician and whether any exclusions or a special status apply.
If clinicians have left or joined the practice, notify Medicare and the IRIS Registry. Check that the information at https://pecos.cms.hhs.gov is up to date. If your practice reports via the IRIS Registry, use a help desk ticket to update the names of the clinicians in your practice information.
Understand the latest measure specifications. If you plan to repeat the same sets of quality measures, promoting interoperability (PI) measures, and improvement activities as last year, make sure that those options are still available and that the specifications haven’t changed. For improvement activities and PI measure specifications, check aao.org/medicare/mips. There are links to the quality measure specifications in the specifications and benchmarking table at aao.org/iris-registry/user-guide/getting-started.
Review the quality measure benchmarks. For the quality benchmarks, see the table mentioned above or Table 3 in EyeNet’s MIPs primer; some benchmarks score lower than they did in 2021. Consider the measures developed by the Academy (look for the “IRIS” prefix), 10 of which now have benchmarks.
Don’t fall behind with your quality measures. Do the following:
If you report via Medicare Part B claims, remember that claims-based reporting needs to be done in real time. It can be difficult to meet the 70% data completeness criteria for a measure if you don’t report on it all year.
If you plan to report manually via the IRIS Registry, are you already entering data into it? If not, start catching up. Entering data into the IRIS Registry throughout the year makes the process much more manageable.
If you plan to report via IRIS Registry–EHR integration, check the numbers for your quality measures at least quarterly to look for potential problems in data mapping or workflow.
Equip Your Staff for Success
Assign MIPS responsibilities. Your practice should have named its MIPS point person and at least one backup.
Ensure access to these resources. If your practice’s MIPS specialists are members of the Academy and/or the AAOE, they can do the following:
- Bookmark the Academy’s MIPS hub page (aao.org/medicare/mips).
- Get step-by-step instructions from the 2022 IRIS Registry Preparation Kit and User Guide. Buy it as a spiral-bound book or download it for free (aao.org/iris-registry/user-guide/getting-started).
- Download MIPS 2022: A Primer and Reference (aao.org/eyenet/mips-manual-2022), or look for it with May’s EyeNet.
- Watch for the latest MIPS news in two weekly e-newsletters: Washington Report Express and, for AAOE members, Practice Management Express.
Not yet a member? Visit aao.org/join or aao.org/membership/join-aaoe.
Attention EHR Users
Verana Health, the Academy’s new IRIS Registry partner, is transitioning EHR integration from FIGmd to Verana Health. The EHR systems used by most practices will be transitioned. For several small EHR systems that do not meet the criteria for transition, FIGmd will continue to support 2022 MIPS reporting. Practices with ineligible EHR systems will need to switch EHR systems or find another way to report 2023 MIPS. If you have not yet heard from Verana Health, send an email to irisdatalink@veranahealth.com.
For more information, visit aao.org/iris-registry/ehr-systems.
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