Home Forums Discussions General Discussion PQRS and Meaningful Use

I have not kept up on PQRS since I decided to end my efforts with Meaningless Use. Is PQRS essentially the same thing? I do not see AC on the list of approved vendors for PQRS. It looks like I have my first 2% penalty for PQRS.

Meaningless Use is reporting to Medicare or Medicaid that you are using an EMR/computer system meaninglessly per the govt guidelines.

Other than it being reporting data to the govt (CMS), PQRS is considerably different. PQRS means reporting quality indicators on selected pts (for instance HgbA1C, BP, etc). While in my view MU is nearly impossible and certainly not cost-effective for a small practice, PQRS is relatively easier. I believe even if you make a token attempt at PQRS you won't get a penalty although that will change in the coming years.

I think AC has some reports that can be used for PQRS. If not, be prepared to either get someone to manually run the reports for you by going into the AC database or suffer the penalty.

JamesNT

One of the other folks on the Boards suggested MD Interactive. It's a simple, cost-effective way to comply with PQRS.

I recently did our PQRS reporting with a company called ReportingMD. They sent a highly customized spreadsheet that I filled in with depersonalized data from AC reports. The whole thing took about 90 minutes per provider.

Agreeing with James and the other responses above; most practices are using another platform (or manually extracting data from AC) to complete their submissions.

more and more requirements.
Less and less reimbursement.
Dead end road.

Pete838,
We are going to do the PQRS report for 2015 now. Could you tell me how you use the AC reporting to complete it. It seems to me there is no report in AC I can use. Thanks.

PCRC
Tampa Florida

We did PQRS on the dementia measures group, so I set up a custom search by Dx code. That generated a patient list. From the patient list I was able to select a sampling of 20 patients and briefly review each patient chart to determine if the PQRS measures were met. i.e., Cognitive assessments, functional status, depression screenings, safety and driving concerns addressed, etc.. From there, you plug the chart ID (info is depersonalized but identifiable internally) in and go down the line and tab by tab affirming that the items had been addressed, not addressed, or don't apply to the patient.

If you like I can email you a spreadsheet that we used. It is customized for dementia, but the company that designed it also does them for other reporting measures groups.

Pete838,
Thanks for the help.
We have a "pqrssolution.com" company working on the PQRS submission. They request us to provide a spread sheet for all 2015 Medicare patients on certain CPT codes. The spread sheet has following collumns:
TIN, NPI, HIC#, First Name, Last Name, Patient ID, PT Gender, PT DOB, Visit Date, Prim Insurer, Sec Insurer, CPT code , ICD code, Modify Code, POS.
At least I have to extract patient name, visit date, CPT code (required certain code). then I can manually check into AC and fill the rest data. So far I cannot find a way to make the first list. For 2014 it was easy to complete by submitting few patient's data. For 2015 it changes, CMS needs whole year data all Medicare patients on certain CPT codes. It will be very hard to complete it manually. If you have any solution that would be great help.

Thanks

pcrc
Tampa Florida

pcrc - some folks have good success with custom reports from AC.

In the event that you want us to make a custom query and output the results in that format, we can do that as well.

Indy,
Thanks for the comments.
Meanwhile I am having helps from AC support team. AC does have a report application which can generate the basic info I need. Also I am requesting a read only user id and password for the SQL server. If that works out, I would make a query to generate the exact report for PQRS request.

Absolutely the way to go if you are willing to do the work. Good Luck!

PCRC or Indy, any success with the SQL access? I recently requested it and created a user name/password in Admin, but don't know how to go forward. I tried to open the AmazingCharts.mdf file with MS Access but it didn't recognize the file format. I asked but so far haven't received any help or data dictionary from AC.

Does anyone know if you can use the same measure group to report pqrs as you did the year before. Example: last year we reported sleep apnea, can we report on that again this year?