A Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) overhaul and evaluation and management changes to support the care of complex patients highlight the final Medicare physician fee schedule for 2020.
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The new MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) framework “aims to align and connect measures and activities across the quality, cost, promoting interoperability, and improvement activities performance categories of MIPS for different specialties or conditions,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in a fact sheet outlining the updates to the Quality Payment Program.
CMS noted that the framework will have measures aimed at population health and public health priorities, as well as reducing the reporting burden of the MIPS program and providing enhanced data and feedback to clinicians.
“We also intend to analyze existing Medicare information so that we can provide clinicians and patients with more information to improve health outcomes,” the agency wrote. “We believe the MVPs framework will help simplify MIPS, create a more cohesive and meaningful participation experience, improve value, reduce clinician burden, and better align with APMs [advanced alternative payment models] to help ease transition between the two tracks.
While the specifics of how the pathways will work are yet to be determined, the goal is to reduce the reporting burden while increasing its clinical applicability
Under the current MIPS structure, clinicians report on a specific number of measures chosen from a menu that may or may not be relevant to the care of patients with a specific disease, such as diabetes.
The MVPs framework will have some “foundation” measures in the first 2 years linked to promoting interoperability and population health that all clinicians will use. These, however, will be coupled with additional measures across the other MIPS categories (quality, cost, and improvement) that are specifically related to diabetes treatment. The expectation is that disease-specific measures plus foundation measures will add up to fewer measures than clinicians currently report, according to CMS.
Over the next 3-5 years, disease-specific measures will be refined and foundation measures expanded to include enhanced performance feedback and patient-reported outcomes.
“We recognize that this will be a significant shift in the way clinicians may potentially participate in MIPS, therefore we want to work closely with clinicians, patients, specialty societies, third parties, and others to establish the MVPs,” CMS officials said.
In the meantime, there are changes to the current MIPS program. Category weighting remains unchanged for the 2020 performance year (payable in 2022), with the performance threshold being 45 points and the exceptional performance threshold being 85 points.
In the quality performance category, the data completeness threshold is increased to 70%, while the agency continues to remove low-bar, standard-of-care process measures and adding new specialty sets, such as audiology, chiropractic medicine, pulmonology, and endocrinology.
In the cost category, 10 new episode-based measures were added to help expand access to this category. In the improvement activities category, CMS reduced barriers to obtaining a patient-centered medical home designation and increased the participation threshold for a practice from a single clinician to 50% of the clinicians in the practice. In the promoting interoperability category, the agency included queries to a prescription drug–monitoring program as an option measure, removed the verify opioid treatment–agreement measure, and reduced the threshold for a group to be considered hospital based from 100% to 75% being hospital based in order for a group to be excluded from reporting measures in this category.
One change not made in the MIPS update is threshold for exclusion from participating in the MIPS program, which has generated continued criticism over the years from the American Medical Group Association, which represents multispecialty practices.
“Overall, CMS expects Part B payment adjustments of 1.4% for those providers who participate in the program,” AMGA officials said in a statement. “However, Congress authorized up to a 9% payment adjustment for the 2020 performance year. While not every provider will achieve the highest possible adjustment, CMS’ continued policy of excluding otherwise eligible providers from participating in MIPS makes it impossible to achieve sustainable payments to cover the cost of participation. Thus, AMGA members have expressed that the program is no longer a viable tool for transitioning to value-based care.”
The physician fee schedule also finalized a number of provisions aimed at reducing administrative burden and increasing the time physicians have with patients. The changes will save clinicians 2.3 million hours per year in burden reduction, according to CMS.
New evaluation and management services (E/M) codes will allow clinicians to choose the appropriate level of coding based on either the medical decision making or time spent with the patient. In 2021, an add-on code will be implemented for prolonged service times for when clinicians spend more time treating complex patients, according to a CMS fact sheet.
Beginning in 2020, clinicians will be paid for care management services for patients with one serious and high-risk condition. Previously, a patient would need at least two serious and high-risk conditions for clinicians to get paid for care management services. For those with multiple chronic conditions, a Medicare-specific code has been added that covers patient visits that last beyond 20 minutes allowed in the current coding for chronic care management services.
The E/M changes are “a significant step in reducing administrative burden that gets in the way of patient care. Now it’s time for vendors and payors to take the necessary steps to align their systems with the E/M office visit code changes by the time the revisions are deployed on Jan. 1, 2021,” Patrice Harris, MD, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.
The American College of Physicians also applauded the change.
“Medicare has long undervalued E/M codes by internal medicine physicians, family physicians, and other cognitive and primary care physicians,” ACP said in a statement, adding that it is “extremely pleased that CMS’s final payment rules will strengthen primary and cognitive care by improving E/M codes and payment levels and reducing administrative burdens.”
The changes also will help address physician shortages, according to ACP officials.
“Fewer physicians are going into office-based internal medicine and other primary care disciplines in large part because Medicare and other payers have long undervalued their services and imposed unreasonable documentation requirements,” they wrote. “CMS’s new rule can help reverse this trend at a time when an aging population will need more primary care physicians, especially internal medicine specialists, to care for them.”
Opioid use disorder treatment programs will be covered by Medicare beginning in 2020. Enrolled opioid treatment programs will receive a bundled payment based on weekly episodes of care that cover Food and Drug Administration–approved medications that treat opioid use disorder, the dispensing and administering those medications, counseling, individual and group therapy, and toxicology testing.
The physician fee schedule also includes codes for telehealth services related to the opioid treatment bundle.
CMS also is finalizing updates on physician supervision of physician assistants to give physician assistants “greater flexibility to practice more broadly in the current health care system in accordance with state law and state scope of practice,” the fact sheet notes.
SOURCE: CMS Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for calendar year 2020.