The MACRA (QPP) API – 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 (QPP) and related topics.

When the MACRA program was announced, CMS also announced a new API for MACRA as well. In that announcement, CMS really just mentioned that the MACRA API would give developers access to the complete list of Advancing Care Information (ACI), Improvement Activities (IA), and quality measures for QPP 2017 (now called the QPP Measures Data Repository). While it was nice of them to offer this API, it really didn’t seem that useful.

Since then, CMS has launched what they call the QPP Submissions APIs which allow developers to submit MACRA data to CMS. This is much more useful and something that I believe will be adopted by many EHR vendors, data registries, etc.

Here’s a quick look at what these MACRA APIs can do:

  • Submissions API
    • Submit data as a single file or a set of smaller files throughout the reporting period, using QRDA-III or a new, streamlined QPP data format
    • Submit, update or delete ACI, IA and quality measures data during the reporting period
    • Receive feedback on the content and accuracy of a submission
    • Receive the preliminary score for a submission, based on the finalized policy
  • CMS Web Interface API
    • If you are registered for the CMS Web Interface, download your group’s beneficiary sample, modify it and submit it to the CMS Web Interface
    • Receive feedback on the content and accuracy of a submission
    • Receive a real-time composite score for a submission

For those that prefer a picture explanation of how the API works, you’ll enjoy this diagram of the current process and how the API works:

It’s great to see CMS really embracing APIs as part of MACRA. Now if we could just get the rest of healthcare and EHR vendors to implement high quality APIs.

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.

1 Comment

  • First, all this quality data has done NOTHING to improve quality. Its just meaningless number movement. Did PQRS do ANYThing to improve quality, reduce cost, improve care? No.

    That aside, ask yourself how much the EHR vendors are going to charge for this API maneuvering. More than the penalties for NOT doing MACRA QPP, for sure.

    MACRA is dead. Meaningless, burdensome, ridiculous activities, piled on to already burned out MDs.

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