ACR voices ‘strong opposition’ to Merit-based Incentive Payment System changes
The American College of Radiology is voicing “strong opposition” to changes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is proposing for its Merit-based Incentive Payment System in 2022.
CMS first revealed the updates in July as part of next year’s proposed physician fee schedule. ACR is miffed that MIPS might retire two quality measurements pertaining to radiology, with options already limited for the specialty.
“The pool of measures available to radiologists has been significantly reduced over the last few years of the MIPS program and the ACR intends to push back against the removal of additional radiology measures,” the professional society said in an Aug. 18 update.
Agency officials are angling to retire MIPS measure 195, covering stenosis measurement in carotid imaging reports and 225, related to reminder systems for screening mammography. ACR saved its strongest words for another proposal to remove quality bonus points for additional high-priority measures. Doing so has encouraged the adoption of new non-benchmarked measures, ACR noted, while also giving the specialty a pathway to improve MIPS scores, despite measures being capped or removed from the program.
Advocates also criticized a CMS proposal to raise the data completeness threshold for quality measures up to 80%.
“The ACR believes this is too steep an increase and may prove difficult for small and rural practices. Instead, the ACR encourages CMS to raise this threshold gradually,” the college suggested.
Meanwhile, ACR voiced support for a plan to raise the score ceiling for new measures during the first two years of their existence. But it wants that timeline bumped up to three years, believing it often takes that long for a measure to reach this level of adoption allowing for a MIPS benchmark. The American College of Radiology said it plans to submit detailed comments to the agency by early September.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.