Quality Measures Reporting

You Can Achieve Success in MACRA Quality Measures Using Certified Health IT

Under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) program, Quality is one of the four measurement categories that impact your overall score, and it’s worth the most points toward your final score (60 points).

As you begin to work toward reporting on MIPS Quality measures, using certified electronic health record (EHR) technology may make your reporting responsibilities much easier.

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How Can Certified EHR Technology Help with Quality Measurement Reporting?

Certified EHR technology supports your MIPS participation in two ways:

1. It may reduce your workload.

Instead of your having to manually extract information from your patient health records and then calculate information for your reports, your certified health information technology (health IT) software may be able to automate data capture and calculation to generate the reports you need.

2. It may help you earn an electronic reporting bonus.

Using a certified EHR technology to capture and report on your clinical data (whether you do so directly through your EHR or through an intermediary such as a clinical data registry), you may earn bonus points on top of your performance score. This may positively impact your overall MIPS payment.
 

A Guide to Earning Bonus Points and Improving Reimbursements

  1. iconUse a Certified EHR Technology. You must capture your patients’ clinical data using a certified EHR technology. Not only can this make you eligible for MIPS bonus points, but most certified EHR technologies automatically capture quality measure data for you as you enter information into each patient’s record.

  2. iconElectronically Calculate Clinical Quality Measures. If you have a certified EHR technology, it may already include a number of electronic clinical quality measures that can be calculated. You may also use the assistance of a third party, like a specialty society registry or qualified clinical data registry (QCDR), to calculate the electronic clinical quality measure data captured within your certified EHR technology.

  3. iconSubmit Quality Measure Reports Electronically. You must submit an electronic file of your electronic clinical quality measure data to CMS. You may use a certified EHR technology with the ability to create an electronic submission file or use the assistance of a third party, like a specialty society registry or QCDR, to submit an electronic file on your behalf.

If you use your certified EHR technology to achieve all three steps—capturing, calculating, and reporting on your clinical quality data—you may earn a bonus for each electronic measure you submit, up to 10 percent of your Quality category score.

The 2015 Edition and the Quality Payment Program

iconThe Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), through the 2015 Edition Health IT Certification Criteria, provides the health IT foundation for MIPS and its Quality category. ONC encourages EHR vendors to certify their technology to the 2015 Edition Final Rule, because this certification signals that the vendor’s product can handle the reporting requirements included in MIPS.

By choosing a certified EHR technology that complies with the 2015 Edition Final Rule, you may have access to tools that automate most, if not all, of the processes needed to capture, calculate and report Quality measures to CMS.

To view the list of certified EHR technologies, visit https://chpl.healthit.gov.