On January 7, 2021, CMS held the “MIPS Value Pathways MVPs Town Hall” Webinar.
The feedback from specialty associations, medical groups, and third-party vendors was insightful. Many commenters pointed out that EHRs not only have to provide Certified EHR Technology but they also need to offer the means for MVPs to be successful.
MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) are a subset of measures and activities established through rulemaking that can be used to meet MIPS reporting requirements. They were designed to relieve unproductive MIPS administrative burden from clinicians while enabling more relevant metrics and reporting. By leveraging MIPS over Paperwork initiative MVPs goal is to move away from individual measure reporting to more meaningful reporting based on medical specialty, public health priority, or a specific clinician’s practice.
EHRs should use the following guiding principles when determining their role in MVPs:
- Since MVPs will consist of complementary sets of measures and activities that are meaningful to clinicians, you should provide ALL measures for each clinician’s specialty. Offering the minimum number of measures to pass certification is not the answer.
- Your dashboard should provide the ability to filter measures based upon the specialty, which will reduce the burden. Measure details should be interchangeable to align scoring. Clinicians need to have a pre-defined set of measures for their specialty and the means to compare their performance with others in the same specialty.
- Allow the clinician to dive deeper into the measure by providing an InfoButton with details on each measure. This would provide comparative performance data that is valuable to patients and caregivers in evaluating clinician performance and making choices about their care. Comparative performance would allow subgroup reporting that comprehensively reflects the services provided by multispecialty groups.
- Encourage the clinicians to utilize the Meaningful Measures approach with icons or noting on the measure dashboard high priority measures, encouraging performance in high priority areas.
- Reduce barriers to APM participation by including measures that are part of APMs where feasible. Provide a user-friendly dashboard linking cost and quality measurement. CMS believes that linking cost and quality measures that the MVP experience with cost and quality measurement may help improve clinician readiness to take on financial risk in APMs.
- Prepare for digital quality measures!
Feedback from registries and EHRs during the town hall meeting highlighted software development and financial burdens. The general consensus was that the goals listed above would require over a year of development time. Since providers are already struggling due to COVID-19 and increased administrative burdens, their EHRs should assist with robust tools to support MVPs.
“We want to develop the future state of MIPS together with each of you to ensure that we are reducing burden, driving value through meaningful participation, and, most importantly, improving outcomes for patients.” -CMS
At Dynamic Health IT, our goal is to be your strategic partner by offering solutions to MVPs and other quality measurement and reporting challenges.
For more information, including MVPs fact sheet and QPP fact sheet, see https://qpp.cms.gov/mips/mips-value-pathways.
