Weisstein Headshot for O'Buzz.jpgOrthoBuzz occasionally receives posts from guest bloggers. This guest post comes from Jason Weisstein, MD, MPH, FACS.

MIPS—the Merit-based Incentive Payment System—is still a mystery to many orthopaedic surgeons. But it can have a big positive or negative impact on your practice.

MIPS is a federal improvement-incentive program consisting of Quality, Resource Use, Clinical Practice Improvement, and Advancing Care components. To demonstrate excellent performance (and reap the associated rewards), physicians can choose the activities and measures that are most meaningful for their practice. Weights are assigned to each category based on a 1 to 100 point scale. In 2017, the transition year, weights are as follows: Quality-60 percent, Cost-0 percent, Improvement Activities-15 percent and Advancing Care Information-25 percent.

I often hear a lot of grumbling from colleagues about their electronic health record (EHR) systems as one of the major causes of physician burnout. However, implementing the right technology will help you excel under this new reimbursement model.

Here are 9 MIPS tips related to EHRs:

  1. Choose the Quality benchmarks that best fit your practice. You need at least 20 eligible cases per Quality measure. Go to the CMS website and select benchmarks that have established measures.
  2. Report Quality for an entire year or over 90 days.
  3. Make sure your EHR has built-in dashboards that enable you to keep an eye on your composite score in near real-time, from day to day.
  4. Be sure that the EHR you select captures data being entered at the point of care and can enable this data to be used for multiple purposes.
  5. Get a head start on the Advancing Care component. Selecting an EHR vendor with successful Meaningful Use (MU) attestations is critical.
  6. Earn bonus points via specialty registries and Clinical Improvement Activities.
  7. Make sure your EHR allows you to compare your performance with that of your peers using analytical tools.
  8. When engaging in Clinical Improvement Activities, follow guidelines based on your specific practice size.
  9. Submit only the required number of Clinical Improvement Activities for the given measurement year, because the following year, you may need to pick a different activity.

With the shift to MIPS and value-based care, orthopaedic surgeons and their teams can thrive by adapting and utilizing technology that fits within their workflows and that helps them understand how they are performing in real time, both within their own practices and compared with their peers nationwide.

Jason Weisstein, MD, MPH, FACS is the Medical Director of Orthopedics at Modernizing Medicine.

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