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VSSL director Joshua Liao and colleagues recently published an analysis of performance among group practices in the first year of Medicare's Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) program. As Dr. Liao and team note:
"Medicare engages over 900,000 clinicians nationwide who care for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. MIPS evaluates clinicians based on activities in four domains: quality, resource use, promoting interoperability (use of health information technology), and improvement activities. Performance in these domains is combined into a “composite performance score” (CPS), which is used to adjust clinicians’ overall Medicare payment rates. These adjustments can be significant, ranging from 5% in 2020 to 9% in 2022 and beyond."
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The study team found that overall, 64% of MIPS practices received a positive payment adjustment while 0.6% received no adjustment and 35.3% received a negative adjustment. The mean/median CPS was 44/40, with a large proportion of
practices (8,006) receiving scores of 0.
Several practice characteristics varied by MIPS performance. In particular, compared to low performers, positive performers were larger, multi-specialty practices with larger patient populations. Characteristics of the communities served by practices also varied by performance group.
Read the full paper here.