MACRA + Physician Compliance in 2017

  • Expanding access to your practice.
  • Coordinating care, such as with phone and digital communications.
  • Engaging with patients in active care plan participation and shared decision-making.
  • Prioritizing patient safety.
  • Don’t bury your head in the sand – start communicating with your professional associations to compare and determine how other providers are preparing and how your practice – based on specialty and size – will be affected.
  • Be sure to stay tuned to regular updates from CMS and your EHR vendor.
  • Providers might be able to opt out of attesting data in 2017, but will receive negative adjustments in 2019. Special assistance and accommodations will be made available to providers in rural settings and larger practice groups.
  • Providers can choose between a 90-day and full-year reporting period. Note that most choices of reporting weight bonuses and penalties. MIPS is a program that will work to encourage providers to adopt quickly and with few loopholes or delays.
  • PQRS data will be published and used as benchmarks for 2017.
  • Providers will not be evaluated on cost or resource use during the first year. Providers are encouraged to track this to help them determine the progress, baseline, and areas of improvement.
  • Work closely with your EHR vendor to ensure you understand how to use the product effectively and efficiently – reporting information is only beneficial when it is calculated correctly.
  • Even if your EHR is not calculating or ready to start calculating for MACRA in the beginning of 2017, using your EHR correctly will be vital to ensure calculations are useable at a later date.
  • Sharing logins: This is not just a HIPAA violation. It will also cause inaccurate credit and penalties to be applied to patient charts and provider calculations. Individuals at the practice should have their own login.
  • Starting/signing charts: If your EHR allows charts to be started by one provider and signed off on by another, it is important to understand how that EHR is applying credit and that the appropriate providers are participating as their scope allows.
  • Staying up-to-date: Larger practices that fall behind play a constant game of catch up that make it difficult to record all of the necessary information to increase earning potential. Entering backdated information runs the risk of the EHR not calculating information correctly or it being entered inaccurately.