MIPS 2020—Your Nine-Step Guide to MIPS Resources

From aao.org/medicare, you can navigate to a rich range of ophthalmic-specific resources, including:

• The 2020 MIPS Small Practice Roadmap
• A survival guide to help solo practitioners and small practices
• The 2020 MIPS Large Practice Roadmap
• Guidance on the four performance categories: quality, promoting interoperability, improvement activities, and cost
• Subspecialty-specific lists of quality measures
• A dedicated web page for each of the quality measures most relevant to ophthalmology. These web pages feature:
• reporting options
• instructions
• lists of relevant ICD-10, CPT Category I, HCPCS, and CPT Category II codes
• benchmarks
• A web page for each of the most relevant improvement activities and the promoting interoperability measures
• A MIPS-specific news feed

The IRIS Registry is a unique MIPS reporting mechanism: It is free for Academy members, it focuses exclusively on ophthalmology, and it offers subspecialty-specific QCDR quality measures.

IRIS Registry–EHR integration minimizes the reporting burden. If you integrate your electronic health record (EHR) system with the IRIS Registry, you can use an automated process to extract the data that are needed for reporting the quality performance category. After the performance year is over, an IRIS Registry algorithm will select the quality measures that will maximize your score. Promoting interoperability measures and improvement activities can only be reported manually.

No EHR? If you don’t have an EHR system, you can report MIPS quality measures and the subspecialty-specific QCDR quality measures manually via the IRIS Registry.

IRIS Registry staff monitor changes to the MIPS regulations. Physician payment regulations are constantly in flux. When there are changes to MIPS, IRIS Registry staff—working closely with the AAOE’s coding specialists and with regulatory experts at the Academy’s D.C. office—determine how those changes specifically impact ophthalmology, and they update the IRIS Registry accordingly.

Make sure you are signed up for the IRIS Registry. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, the deadline for signing up for IRIS Registry–EHR integration has been extended to Jan. 19. If you are only interested in manual reporting via the IRIS Registry and haven’t previously registered with it, you have until Oct. 31 to register. (Note: If you signed up for IRIS Registry–EHR integration, you don’t sign up separately for the manual reporting.)

To learn about the latest MIPS developments, watch for Washington Report Express (Thursdays), Medicare Physician Payment Update (first Saturday of the month), and—if you are in the AAOE—Practice Management Express (Sundays).

Send MIPS questions to mips@aao.org; IRIS Registry questions to irisregistry@aao.org.