The Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), formally known as PQRI, is a voluntary program that enables physicians to receive financial incentives for making the decision to report quality clinical data about their Medicare Part B FFS Patients to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Participating in this process will make it easier for CMS to have a better understanding of the patient care that is given to individuals who have Medicare. The ultimate goal is to receive enough data to make the necessary tweaks so that everyone involved will get the most out of this program. The following are several perks to using this system.
1. Receive Incentive Payments
Any qualified member of the medical field who voluntarily meets all of the reporting criteria can be eligible for an incentive, including physicians, chiropractors, occupational therapists, physician assistants, certified social workers, clinical nurse specialists and a wide variety of other healthcare professionals. The incentive does very from year to year. For example, the 2014 PQRS is 0.5 percent, but it has been as high as 2 percent within the last seven years.
2. Select Just One Measure Group
There are two different ways to become eligible for the annual incentive. You can choose to report on one specific measure group or three individual measures. In other words, no matter how many patients you have who utilize Medicare, you could make the decision to isolate just your dementia patients for reporting purposes.
Additionally, you are only required to report on 20 unique patients from within the measure group you select. This makes the process much easier to maintain, but it still provides valuable insight to CMS. There are currently more than 20 measure groups to choose from, so most healthcare professionals will have enough patients within at least one of these groups.
3. Be Eligible to Receive a Feedback Report
When you participate in the PQRS, you will be able to receive a feedback report during each reporting period that will detail the data that your submitted, whether or not it is eligible and the applicable payment information. This will make it easier for you to track the PQRS process so that you will know whether or not to expect an incentive payment.
4. Select Easier Reporting
Many healthcare professionals believe it is necessary to manually complete all of the PQRS forms, but this is not actually the case. Instead, you can turn to a registry-based reporting solution to have all the necessary data pulled from your electronic filing system and placed directly into the PQRS healthcare reports. This will also make it easier for you to receive an incentive by simplifying the process of meeting all of the reporting criteria.
5. Make a Positive Impact on Medicare
Although most healthcare providers do not like the idea of taking the time to complete extraneous reports, the incentive that is offered is intended to help offset this factor in order to make a positive impact on Medicare. After all, without volunteers within the healthcare industry submitting this information, CMS would not have the necessary data to tweak things as needed.
As you can see, choosing to participate in the PQRS does not need to require an extensive amount of time from your end, and it can provide you with a nice financial incentive once a year. Therefore, voluntarily reporting data on applicable patients can be very rewarding, and you will also have the knowledge that your actions can help people who rely on Medicare.
Lisa Coleman shares the perks for a health care provider when utilizing a physician quality reporting system. She recently researched the incentives of a PQRS healthcare system to help her complete this article.
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