Are You Ready? Medicare’s 2008 Pay-for-Reporting Program Starts January 1!
Are you ready for Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) in 2008?
We are!
Our clients know how easy it was to participate in the PQRI incentive program last year. That’s because athenahealth built proactive “Medicare PQRI Rules” that were independent of each other, allowing medical practices to select the measures appropriate for the providers at their practice. Clients simply continued using athenaNet® as usual, with virtually no disruption to the practice.
The benefit? Providers who successfully reported quality measure data on claims for services between July 1 and December 31, 2007 will receive a single consolidated incentive payment in mid 2008.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will continue the PQRI in 2008, including bonus payments for satisfactory submission of data on the quality of covered professional services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. While CMS hasn’t determined the amount of the 2008 incentive payment, as with the 2007 PQRI, they anticipate that the bonus payments will be approximately 1.5 percent of allowed charges for participating professionals.
athenahealth’s PQRI team has been monitoring the CMS website, participating in provider conference calls and testing new functionality in athenaNet to make it as easy as possible for clients to continue participating in PQRI. Once again, we’ve created physician quality measures and coding rules for our entire national client base. And with key upgrades in athenaNet, including better control over selection and activation of the rules, it’s easier than ever for clients to take advantage of this incentive program.
PQRI is part of CMS’ overall quality improvement effort. Participating physicians benefit from capturing data about the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries along a set of 74 distinct measures in 2007. These quality measures are typically based on a combination of diagnosis and procedure codes, but may also include other factors such as the patient’s age. CMS has added 45 measures to the 2008 program bringing the total to 119. There are new measures for additional specialties not covered last year, such as podiatry, and also measures for non-physicians such as ‘Universal Weight Screening (BMI) and Follow-up’.
As the PQRI program is subject to updates and modifications by CMS – right up until the day before the program begins – athenahealth’s flexible, web-based system will update any changes in the program as they happen to allow physicians to continue maximizing their collections rate.
While CMS still has decisions to make about the 2008 program, including the amount of the incentive payment, it officially begins on January 1, 2008.
Visit the CMS website for additional information.