The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that it has several “prevailing concerns” regarding the accuracy of the 2017 Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) scoring data that was used to set the 2019 MIPS payment adjustments.  According to CMS, the concerns at issue relate to problems in the scoring logic used by CMS to generate the MIPS final scores for 2017.  In light of these “prevailing concerns” and the identified errors, CMS went about the task of “addressing and correcting” the 2017 MIPS data.  As a result, on September 13, 2018, CMS posted to the CMS Quality Payment Program (“QPP”) website the CMS revisions to the 2017 MIPS final scores and their associated 2019 MIPS payment adjustments.
Continue Reading The Merit-Based Incentive Payment System’s Targeted Review Deadline is Upon Us: Physicians, Groups, and other Clinicians have until October 15, 2018 to Identify and Report Errors in the Calculation of their 2017 MIPS Final Scores

With all the talk of the Affordable Care Act’s uncertain future, it is easy to forget about the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (“MACRA”), a bipartisan law passed by Congress in 2015 to change the way physicians will be reimbursed by Medicare. MACRA is a complex and confusing law. A new study published by Health Affairs in April 2017, which used the RAND Corporation’s Health Care Payment and Delivery Simulation Model (the “Study”), has estimated the potential effects of MACRA payment models on physician and hospital Medicare reimbursement revenue. The results: uncertain.
Continue Reading The Financial Impact of MACRA – Uncertainty Reigns in a Recent RAND Corporation Study