Cost and Clinical Practice Improvement Activities (CPIA) 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.

We’re continuing to move through the various MIPS performance categories as we cover the details of MACRA. Today we’re going to cover the Cost and Clinical Practice Improvement Activities (CPIA) Categories.

MIPS Cost Category
We won’t cover much of the Cost (Formerly known as Resource Use) category since it has basically been relegated to future MACRA requirements. For those that missed it, the cost category has a weighting of 0% in 2017, so it basically won’t impact your MACRA payment adjustment at all. In 2017, they’re looking at feedback for this category, but it won’t affect your 2019 payments.

You’ll probably remember that the Cost category was the replacement to the value-based modifier and didn’t require any reporting on the part of the provider. Instead, the cost category is tracked using the Medicare claims data. This means that CMS will still have the data they need to evaluate this category without any additional work from providers.

MIPS Clinical Practice Improvement Activities (CPIA) Category
You’ll remember that the Clinical Practice Improvement Activities (CPIA) category is a new category that was added as part of MACRA. This category will account for 15% of your MIPS score. This category has some small practice exceptions and also special credit for those participating in a patient-centered medical home or other similar medical home model.

Under CPIA providers must choose from 90+ activities in the following 9 subcategories:

CPIA will be scored on a total of 40 points with “Medium” activities scoring 10 points and “High” activities scoring 20 points. These point totals are doubled for small, rural, and underserved practices. That means that small practices only need to do 1-2 activities to get full credit for this category. Larger practices only need to do 2-4.

The Cost and CPIA MIPS categories only make up 15% of your total MIPS score. So, they’re not going to be a significant impact on your MACRA score either way. However, if you do even just 1 improvement activity (CPIA), then you’ll avoid any negative payment adjustment thanks to MIPS pick your pace.

That’s all for this week’s MACRA Monday. Next week we’ll talk Advancing Care Information (ACI) or what most of you call meaningful use.

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.

   

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