Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

With Medicare changes coming left and right, CMS offers some relief to providers trying to catch up.

Originally, the deadline for reporting data for your 2016 EHR measures under the Physician Quality Reporting Systems (PQRS) was March 13, 2017, at midnight. But in a recent update, CMS extended the deadline to March 31, 2017, for “individual eligible professionals (EPs), PQRS group practices, qualified clinical data registries (QCDRs), and qualified EHR data submission vendors (DSVs),” notes CMS on its website. This comes as a relief to many trying to accommodate the new 2016 requirements. Read the CMS report here: www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/PQRS/Downloads/2016EHRSubmissionDate.pdf.

The new 2016 reporting guidelines require EPs to show “at least nine measures covering a minimum of three National Quality Strategy (NQS) domains to avoid a penalty in 2018,” CMS says on the PQRS webpage. “If the EP’s CEHRT does not contain patient data for at least nine measures covering at least three domains, then the EP must report all the measures for which there is Medicare patient data. An EP must report on at least one measure containing Medicare patient data and report on all payers.”

Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) and the last attestation date to report Meaningful Use have come and gone. If you missed the March 13, 2017 deadline for either, contact your Medicare carrier or CMS directly to assess any penalties.

For more information on the PQRS 2016 reporting timeline, visit www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/PQRS/Spotlight.html.