“The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is updating quality measure reporting across its Shared Services Program with the aim of improving quality of care.”
“The Shared Servings Program offers the opportunity for groups of medical providers and hospitals to form Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which voluntarily provide coordinated, high-quality care for Medicare beneficiaries. The payment system between CMS and ACOs incentivize providers to shift away from volume of care and toward value and outcomes. Participating groups must report quality data to CMS at the end of every year to maintain eligibility.”
“But the groups have faced various challenges aggregating data across their networks. As a result, CMS has been transitioning from web-based reporting to more digital methods like electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs), merit-based incentive payment system quality measures (MIPS CQMs) and digital quality measures (dQMs).”
“These quality measures will help assess and track the quality of health care services ACOs provide, as generated by a provider’s electronic health records, said CMS Performance Based Payment Policy Division of Program Alignment & Communication Director Steven Johnson during the 2022 HIMSS Conference in Orlando, Florida, Tuesday.”
“CMS solicited feedback from ACOs and learned they preferred the eCQM and MIPS CQM reporting and wanted to balance transition from legacy web reporting and data abstraction with new requirements around the quality measure standards and electronic extraction. The ACOs also expressed to CMS concerns around data aggregation across multiple EHRs and cost, so CMS established steps to adopt the eCQMs/MIPS CQM system.”
“CMS new six-prong strategy to implement quality measure changes include…” Read the full article here.
Source: How CMS is Improving ACO Data Aggregation, Quality Care Reporting – By Melissa Harris, March 15, 2022. GovCIO.
