The MIPS final regulation for 2022 has been made public. For small practices, there have been several adjustments that are quite beneficial. In addition to the usual modifications to measures, there are statutory amendments. We’ll go over the modifications to Traditional MIPS.
Clinicians Eligible for MIPS
Two new types of eligible clinicians are available. With this modification, the list is now consistent with the categories of clinicians who can take part in alternative payment models.
Clinicians in social work
- For these doctors, Promoting Interoperability will be reweighted to 0%, and a specialist set of Quality metrics is accessible.
- A specialized set of quality measures is offered for certified nurse midwives.
Performance Limits
Raising the performance criterion for the first five years of the MIPS program is mandated by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. 2022 marks the program’s sixth year. The performance threshold must be the “mean or median of the composite performance scores for all MIPS eligible professionals” from an earlier time period starting with year six onward. These levels ought to be roughly the same for the duration of the program because they are mandatory for the sixth year and subsequent years.
The mean final score from the 2017 performance year/2019 MIPS payment year will be used by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to determine the performance threshold for the 2022 performance year/2024 payment year.
89 points are the additional performance cutoff.
o The actual 2017 final scores above 75 points fall into this quarter’s 25th percentile.
Weighting by Performance Category
These performance category weights are in accordance with the law.
For small practises, the performance category weighting is the biggest difference. The category for “Promoting Interoperability” will automatically change in weight going ahead.
The remaining performance categories will have the following weights when Promoting Interoperability is reweighted:
- Quality:40%
- Cost: 30%
- Improvement-related actions: 30%
Reweighting the performance criteria for Cost and Promoting Interoperability results in:
- 50% Quality
- 50% of improvement efforts
When categories were reweighted in previous years, the weight tended to favor the Quality category. If that were to remain the same, it would be challenging for a small practice or specialty practice to meet the 75-point performance criteria, particularly in the absence of an electronic health record or with a dearth of appropriate quality indicators. It significantly lessens the load on these small and specialty practices by balancing the reweighting.
Performance Levels
Quality
Take away bonus points for high-priority/outcome measures and end-to-end electronic reporting.
With few exclusions for tiny practices, get rid of the 3-point floor for scoring measures as of the 2023 performance period.
A total of 200 quality measures will be accessible for the 2022 performance period after the quality measure inventory has been updated.
substantial alterations to 87 currently used MIPS quality measures
Modifications to specialty sets
Measures that have been taken out of some specialty sets
13 quality measures are dropped
Four new quality measures have been added, including one new administrative claims measure:
Risk-standardized Hospital Admission Rates for Patients with Multiple Chronic Conditions by Clinician and Clinician Group
Only practices that submitted data for another performance category as a group will have their Medicare Part B claims metrics used by CMS to determine a group-level quality score (signaling their intent to participate as a group).
Encouraging compatibility
by applying automatic reweighting to small practices and clinical social workers.
the following reporting required revisions:
To assist public health agencies (PHAs) through upcoming health threats and the protracted COVID-19 recovery process, the Public Health and Clinical Data Exchange objective’s reporting requirements should be revised.
Add a fourth exclusion for the Electronic Case Reporting measure, which will only be used in 2022.
Beginning with the CY 2022 performance period, mandate that MIPS-eligible doctors attest to doing an annual assessment of the High-Priority Guide of the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience Guides (SAFER Guides).
To comply with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) requirements established in the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule, modify the Prevention of Information Blocking attestation statements to make a distinction between this and different information blocking policies.
Cost
New episode-based cost measures number five.
Colon and rectal resection following two procedural melanoma resections
One Urgent and Two Chronic
Enhancement Initiatives
- Seven new Improvement Activities will be added. Health equity will be covered by three of them.
- 15 activities will be changed. Eleven will deal with health equity.
- There will be a six-measure removal.
The 2022 MIPS Final Rule modifications are described in general here. Resources for this last rule are available here.
Check the QPP site resources in mid-December to observe the modifications to the measures. Make sure your options are still available and take note of any differences so you can respond to them effectively. If there is any way that we can assist you with your MIPS plan for 2022, please contact us at techassist@qsource.org.
