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PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
MIPS Relief, Reform and Research in Play to Make Program Relevant
By Andis Robeznieks, AMA Senior News Writer
MIPS
Physician advocacy efforts to refine the Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) seek to make the program more clinically relevant, less burdensome and more transparent have continued through the pandemic. So have efforts to promote regulatory and financial relief for physician practices facing economic hardships because of COVID-19.
Most notably, these efforts resulted in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recent decision to reweight the MIPS cost performance category to 0% of the final score for practices and physicians who report quality, promoting interoperability, or improvement activity data for the 2020 performance year.
As a result of the reweighting, physicians will be held harmless from unfair evaluations in the MIPS cost performance category.
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MIPS uses a scoring system designed to reward physicians and other clinicians for improving the quality of the health care they deliver. Last fall, in recognition of the difficulties practicing during the COVID-19 pandemic, CMS invoked a policy allowing MIPS participants to request reweighting of one or more of the program’s performance categories, which are: quality, cost, promoting interoperability, and improvement activities. In addition, physician advocacy resulted in CMS’ decision to automatically apply an extreme and uncontrollable hardship exception to all MIPS eligible clinicians, holding them harmless from a penalty if they were unable to submit any data.
In its more recent decision to reweigh the cost category to 0%, CMS acknowledged the negative financial impact COVID-19 has had on practices,
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