Here are the highlights of the Final Rule for QPP for Year 2 under MACRA as announced by CMS yesterday:
• Weighting the MIPS Cost performance category to 10% of your total MIPS final score, and the Quality performance category to 50%.
• Raising the MIPS performance threshold to 15 points in Year 2 (from 3 points in the transition year).
• Allowing the use of 2014 Edition and/or 2015 Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) in Year 2 for the Advancing Care Information performance category, and giving a bonus for using only 2015 CEHRT.
• Awarding up to 5 bonus points on your MIPS final score for treatment of complex patients.
• Automatically weighting the Quality, Advancing Care Information, and Improvement Activities performance categories at 0% of the MIPS final score for clinicians impacted by Hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria and other natural disasters.
• Adding 5 bonus points to the MIPS final scores of small practices.
• Adding Virtual Groups as a participation option for MIPS.
• Issuing an interim final rule with comment for extreme and uncontrollable circumstances where clinicians can be automatically exempt from these categories in the transition year without submitting a hardship exception application (note that Cost has a 0% weight in the transition year) if they were have been affected by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which occurred during the 2017 MIPS performance period.
• Decreasing the number of doctors and clinicians required to participate as a way to provide further flexibility by excluding individual MIPS eligible clinicians or groups with ≤$90,000 in Part B allowed charges or ≤200 Medicare Part B beneficiaries.
• Providing more detail on how eligible clinicians participating in selected APMs (known as MIPS APMs) will be assessed under the APM scoring standard.
• Creating additional flexibilities and pathways to allow clinicians to be successful under the All Payer Combination Option. This option will be available beginning in performance year 2019.
