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The Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) unfairly penalizes physicians caring for a patient population with more complex medical needs, according to a study in JAMA Network.
MIPS, the largest value-based payment system in the U.S., pays about 1 million physicians who care for Medicare patients based on scores in four categories: cost, quality, improvement activities and interoperability.
In a cross-sectional study of 80,246 primary care physicians participating in the MIPS program in 2019 who cared for 4.6 million patients, researchers with Weill Cornell Medical College concluded that “MIPS scores were inconsistently related to performance on process and outcome measures, and physicians caring for more medically complex and socially vulnerable patients were more likely to receive low MIPS scores, even when they delivered relatively high-quality care.”