Home Forums Discussions MACRA/MIPS MACRA/MIPs for 2017 - Avoid any reduction in 2019 Reimbursements

Would you invest the effort to avoid any deduction in 2019 if it honestly only took you 30 minutes of your time in 2017, and 30 minutes is probably the extreme.

We've seen various users post that they have no plans in participating in MIPS for 2017 and will just take the 4% deduction in 2019. The subject can be rather complicated. I do this for a living and lately I've been wishing I had taken the Carpenter route 30 years ago. Thankfully we have some pretty smart people to support me here at Amazing Charts. This particular post is going to be solely focused on helping you understand what you can do in 2017 to avoid any reduction in 2019. We'll save the rest for a future discussion. We have developed a short "pocket reference" that encapsulates the various options you have available. The hope is that this short document is self-supporting and needs no further explanation so I won't recap it here. It assumes you have some basic previous knowledge of MIPS or at a minimum Meaningful Use participation in general.

Hopefully it will foster further discussion between members of this board that would assist others lacking MIPS familiarity. We would also sincerely appreciate any comments you have on the content or suggestions for improved clarity.

Please click on this link for the document : Avoid the penalty for 2019

Well did click on the link found the statement 'version 10 and registry submission both come at additional cost"
Is version 10 by itself going to cost more than current yearly support?

Thanks for posting the document. Unfortunately, lot of doctors ignore these things because they have decided not to participate. It is complicated and gets more so in future years. Some of us wish that the whole thing will go away(new administration?).

But for those who want to take a look at the process for at least 2017, your document is a welcome help. 2017 requirements are fairly easy to meet.

We have used ABFM's free PQRS registry to submit our data. This is a manual process, reporting on 20 patients. Takes a couple of hours to do. Too late for 2016 submission.

ABFM also has a free registry available, PRIME, for 2017. This is linked to your EHR and it extracts data and submits it to CMS. Anyone using this successfully with Amazing Charts?
Any problems? This will be of enormous help for those planning to extract (or not to loose)
a few dollars.

Some third party payers (in addition to Medicare) require you to participate in MIPS as a condition for payment of their own incentives.

A type of stockholm syndrome

I have been working on ours today to get prepared. Probably will pick the latest possible reporting period(Oct.2 thru Dec 31) as who knows if the current requirements will still be the requirements by then.

However as a small, independent practice it appears that the test program you laid out is extremely easy, the Participate program is also not bad and should easily be attainable. If you have been doing PQRS and Meaningful Use, you've been doing it already.

My plan is to do the Report plan as a goal and at the very least Participate. My question however is will AC be upgraded to allow for this reporting rather than trying to make piecemeal out of the former Meaningful Use reporting options.

I saw in the link there will be something new within version 10, but it does not say exactly what that will entail. It also says there is additional cost, as a Guardian Support subscriber will the upgrade to version 10 be included, I believe upgrades were included when we signed up for the support package.

One important change to be aware of for 2017 registry reporting is that the measure group option (20 patients) has been removed. Providers will have to report on individual measures (frequency based on the measure specification) and the overall reporting rate for each measure must be >= 49.50% (rounded >= 50%) for the measure to be satisfactorily reported.

Please see my post here about using the test path for MIPS/MACRA.