Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Plus: CMS says MIPS participation is up, too.

Many providers found the 2017 Quality Payment Program (QPP) results and 2019 incentives to be lackluster. However, recent updates from Medicare suggest that the 2018 results and 2020 payments offer something to smile about.

Due to confusion and paperwork burdens, many clinicians found the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) challenging during the first performance year, relates the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in a release. However, provider feedback led the agency to institute programs like Patients Over Paperwork and Meaningful Measures, and this has positively impacted the program, suggests CMS.

In fact, the numbers show that participation increased from 2017 to 2018, and positive adjustments went up, too.

“98 percent of eligible clinicians participating in MIPS will receive a positive payment adjustment in 2020,” CMS says. “This is a 5-point increase over the 2017 performance year — that’s with an overall positive performance threshold for MIPS increase from 3 points in 2017 to 15 points in 2018.”

Of the 889,995 clinicians reporting measures for performance year 2018, 872,148 will receive a neutral or positive adjustment in payment year 2020, CMS indicates.

See a more in-depth breakdown of the results at www.cms.gov/blog/2018-quality-payment-program-qpp-performance-results.