CMS Drops Proposed Rule Impacting Quality Payment Program, MSSP ACOs

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on Aug. 3 released a rule that proposes changes to the Quality Payment Program (QPP) and Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) for 2021. According to federal officials, because providers must stay focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of significant proposed changes to the programs are limited.

The QPP under MACRA (the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015) has included two payment paths that eligible Medicare-participating physicians could partake in—the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the advanced alternative payment models (APM) track.

Last year, CMS announced that a new MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) framework, starting in 2021, will move MIPS from its current state—which requires clinicians to report on many measures across the multiple performance categories, such as Quality, Cost, Promoting Interoperability and Improvement Activities—to a system in which clinicians will report much less. Under MVPs, clinicians would report on a smaller set of measures that are specialty-specific, outcome-based, and more closely aligned to APMs. MVPs will connect activities  and measures from  the four existing MIPS performance  categories that are relevant  to the population they are caring for a specialty or medical  condition, according to CMS.

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