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  • MIPS Manual 2017—Quality: MIPS Versus PQRS (Good News, Bad News)

    By Rebecca Hancock, Flora Lum, MD, Chris McDonagh, Cherie McNett, Jessica Peterson, MD, MPH, and Sue Vicchrilli, COT, OCS
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    This content was excerpted from EyeNet’s MIPS Manual 2017.

    First, the good news. In several ways, participating in MIPS will be less burdensome than PQRS:

    • You can avoid the payment penalty with minimal reporting.
    • Under the MIPS quality performance category, you report up to 6 measures; under PQRS, you had to report a minimum of 9 measures—if you reported fewer than 9, you would fail PQRS.
    • Under MIPS, there is no requirement to report quality measures from multiple National Quality Strategy (NQS) domains; under PQRS, you had to report measures from at least 3 NQS domains.
    • Under MIPS, during the 2017 transitional year, if you want to earn more than 3 points for a measure, the minimum performance period is 90 days—but you don’t even have to report for that long if you just want to score the 3 points that are needed to avoid the payment penalty (see “How to Avoid the Payment Penalty”); under PQRS, the performance period was a year.

    For practices without EHR, the bad news. CMS has eliminated the 2 least burdensome reporting options—the cataracts measures group and the diabetic retinopathy measures group. The most straightforward option for practices without EHR is to report individual measures via the IRIS Registry web portal.

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    Next: Browse the Academy’s online listings of quality measures, download at-a-glance PDFs of the MIPS quality measures and non-MIPS quality measures, or read Financial Impact: Your 2017 MIPS Final Score Will Impact Your 2019 Medicare Reimbursement

    Note: Meeting regulatory requirements is a complicated process involving continually changing rules and the application of judgment to factual situations. The Academy does not guarantee or warrant that regulators and public or private payers will agree with the Academy’s information or recommendations. The Academy shall not be liable to you or any other party to any extent whatsoever for errors in, or omissions from, any such information provided by the Academy, its employees, agents, or representatives.

    COPYRIGHT© 2017, American Academy of Ophthalmology, Inc.® All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. American Academy of Ophthalmic Executives® and IRIS® Registry are trademarks of the American Academy of Ophthalmology®.