The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a tool to automatically share electronic data for the Medicare Quality Payment Program (QPP). This new release is the first in a series that will be part of CMS’s ongoing efforts to spur the creation of innovative, customizable tools to reduce burden for clinicians, while also supporting high-quality care for patients.
In October, CMS launched the QPP website, an interactive site to help clinicians understand the program and successfully participate. The tool release, commonly referred to as an Application Program Interface (API), builds on the QPP website by making it easier for other organizations to retrieve and maintain QPP measures and enable them to build applications for clinicians and their practices. The API will allow developers to write software using the information described on the Explore Measures section of QPP website. Based on interviews with clinicians, CMS created the Explores Measures tool, which enables clinicians and practice managers to select measures that likely fit their practice, assemble them into a group, and print or save them for reference. Already, tens of thousands of people are using this tool.
Dr. Kate Goodrich, director of the CMS Centers for Clinical Standards and Quality said, “The release of the API will continue CMS’s focus on user-driven design by providing developers and our partners the opportunity to turn our data into powerful applications. CMS is committed to collaborating with the organizations that doctors trust to make their lives easier, while supporting their efforts to improve the quality of care across America.”
“An important part of the QPP is to make it easier and less expensive to participate, so clinicians may focus on seeing patients,” said Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of CMS. “This first release is a step in that process, both for physicians and the technologists who support them.”
In addition, CMS released the following fact sheets:
- Measure Specifications
- Measures Specifications Implementation Guide
- Measures Specifications Download (232 MB)