Details for 3 MIPS Performance Categories – MACRA Monday

This post is part of the MACRA Monday series of blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

Last week we got a bit side tracked on MACRA Monday as we covered the news about modifications to the MACRA timeline. That seems to be a welcome change. As we mentioned at the end of our post on the MIPS performance categories and MIPS composite score, now we’re going to start diving into the details of those performance categories starting with: Quality Performance, Resource Use (Cost), and the new Clinical Practice Improvement Activities Category.

Quality Performance Category
This category is a replacement for PQRS, but is a reduction from 9 to only 6 measures. Plus, there is no longer a domain requirement. MIPS also expands the program to include close to 300 measures. To combat this explosion of options, they’ll also be offering specialty specific measure sets so that each specialty can more easily identify the measures that might be best for their specialty.

The Quality Performance category makes up 50% of the MIPS composite score.

Resource Use (Cost) Category
The resource use category is also often called the cost category and is a replacement of the value based modifier. The great part of the resource use category is that there is no data submission required to report your work in this category. Instead, this MIPS category will be calculated based on your Medicare claims. MACRA will add 40+ episodic specific measures so providers have more options to participate in this category.

The Resource Use (Cost) category makes up 10% of the MIPS composite score.

Clinical Practice Improvement Activities Category
The CPIA (Clinical Practice Improvement Activies) category that is the new category created as part of MACRA. It will include 90+ activities to choose from and you must participate in a minimum of one activity. Small practices (ie. 15 or fewer professionals) can participate in 2 activities and receive full credit for CPIA. Practices participating as a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) also receive full credit for this category. Participation in an APM gives you 50% credit.

The Clinical Practice Improvement Activities category makes up 15% of the MIPS Composite Score.

That’s the general overview for these three MIPS performance categories. We’ll cover the Advancing Care Information category next week since it’s a bit more complicated.

Be sure to check out all of our MACRA Monday blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • I’ve been searching for an article that will give my clients a quick but informative overview of each category. This is the best I’ve found so far. Thank you! I cannot wait for next week’s post on the Advancing Care Information category because that seems to confuse many.

  • Taylor,
    So glad to hear this has helped. That’s the goal of this series. To simplify people’s understanding of MACRA. Advancing Care Information is confusing. I’m excited for the final rule to come out so we can dive in even more deeply to the changes for each category. I think doing so before the final rule is probably premature.

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