Overview of the Advancing Care Information Category in MIPS – 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.

In our last edition of MACRA Monday we covered 3 of the 4 categories that are part of MIPS: Quality Performance, Resource Use (Cost), and the new Clinical Practice Improvement Activities Category. This week we’ll be covering the details of the 4th category known as Advancing Care Information.

The Advancing Care Information category is probably one you’ve heard about since it’s the replacement for the well known meaningful use program. One change that will be available in the Advancing Care Information category that wasn’t available in meaningful use is that you may participate as an individual or as a group. It’s also worth noting that the Advancing Care Information category makes up 25% of the total MIPS composite score.

One thing that can be a little confusing about MIPS is that the Advancing Care Information category has a score within a score. Advancing Care Information makes up 25% of the MACRA score, but in order to calculate how much of the 25% you’ll receive you have to figure out how many points you receive in the Advancing Care Information category. This chart illustrates how the points will be calculated:
advancing-care-information-scoring-for-macra
As you can see from this chart, your base score, performance score, and any bonus points will be used to calculate whether you receive the full 25% for your MIPS composite score or not.

The base score requires that you report your participation in the following items:

  • Protecting PHI
  • ePrescribing
  • Patient Access
  • Patient Engagement
  • HIE
  • Public Health and Clinical Data Registry Reporting

The good thing about the base score is that you’ll receive full credit for each item if you submit the reports for each item. There’s no threshhold required.

The performance score focuses on the following areas:

  • Patient Electronic Access
  • Coordination of Care through Patient Engagement
  • HIE

Unlike the base score, the performance score will need to achieve certain performance in order to receive points. You’ll also notice that these three areas indicate CMS’ efforts to focus on patient access and health data exchange.

A few other high level things to note for the Advancing Care Information category. First, they’ve removed the “All or Nothing” approach that existed in the EHR (Meaningful Use) program. Second, they’ve removed redundant measures to try and streamline the program. Third, they’ve eliminated CPOE and CDS objectives. Finally, they’ve reduced the number of required public health registries.

As you can see from the list above, this will not be that different than meaningful use. So, if you’ve been participating in meaningful use, then advancing care information won’t be a huge obstacle. If you haven’t been participating in meaningful use, well then you have some work to do.

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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