Is Your Practice on Track With 2022 MIPS?

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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.