Quality care measures are a main component of Dr. Dana Zweig’s patient care philosophy at Bourne Family Medicine, her family medicine practice. Throughout the year, Zweig focuses on taking the best care of her patients possible. Patient engagement and care gap closure are part of her practice’s DNA. “We always try to keep our patients up to date with everything. It’s how I’ve always done things,” Zweig explained. “We try to get people to get their diabetes under control and to come in for their mammograms, pap smears, and colon cancer screenings. It’s just how I practice.”

This emphasis on quality care sets Bourne Family Medicine up for success with quality programs. Zweig predominantly sees Medicare patients at her practice, so she participates in CMS’s Meritbased Incentive Payment System (MIPS), a quality payment program that requires her to report data across four categories: quality, cost, promoting interoperability, and improvement activities.

Zweig wants her practice to not only avoid MIPS-related penalties but also achieve exceptional performance with MIPS, helping her maximize positive payment adjustments on Medicare reimbursements and earn potential additional revenue in the future.

Simplifying a confusing, time-consuming process

Zweig says that athenahealth’s reporting capabilities and the expertise of her customer success manager, Ken Ashe, take the stress out of participating in MIPS. All providers using athenaClinicals can enroll in the MIPS measures of their choice from a diverse library of measures due to athenahealth’s status as both a certified EHR and a Qualified Registry. Providers benefit from native performance reporting tools, point of care notifications of care gaps in need of closure, and athenahealth’s MIPS data submission service — all at no additional cost.

athenahealth Product and Customer Success teams collaborate closely to drive optimization activities and improve provider performance throughout the year. Zweig benefited from one such effort in Q3, as athenahealth leveraged programmatic expertise and network-wide performance insight to optimize her Quality category measure enrollment. This intervention boosted Zweig’s Quality category performance by nine points, from 49 to 58 points,¹ placing her squarely into the range of achieving exceptional performance for program year 2020.

When it’s time to report the necessary data for MIPS at the end of the year, Zweig turns to Ashe for guidance. Zweig says that Ashe takes a lot of the work off her plate, turning what would otherwise be a confusing, time-consuming process into something quick and simple. “At the end of the year, I meet with Ken, and we go over the MIPS dashboard,” said Zweig. “He tells me what I need to fix, and he helps me finalize the data in a way that he can send it off.” Because Zweig is already on top of quality measures, the areas Ashe flags for improvement are administrative in nature, ensuring that quality data is signed-off, processed, and can be submitted via athenahealth directly to CMS.

With support from athenahealth, Bourne Family Medicine has been able to achieve a MIPS score of 100 for 2020, the best possible score.² Exceptional performance helps her maximize revenue, with a positive payment adjustment on Medicare reimbursements and potential revenue opportunity in the future. “athenahealth has been very helpful in helping me report on quality programs,” said Zweig. “It’s a big burden taken off my chest, and I really appreciate it.”