Source: AAFP News, January 10, 2018, (c) American Academy of Family Physicians
The new year has arrived and with it comes a valuable resource to help family physicians get engaged with — and succeed in — the Merit-Based Incentive Payment Program (MIPS), one track of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Quality Payment Program (QPP).
The 2018 MIPS Playbook is available to every American Academy of Family Physicians member free of charge; simply log into your AAFP account and download the PDF.
Why take the time? Because this playbook is a step-by-step recipe for success for family medicine practices of all sizes that begins with a list of major QPP changes in 2018.
Lead author Amy Mullins, MD, is the AAFP’s medical director for quality improvement and the Academy’s leading expert on the topic.
Dr. Mullins understands the joys and frustrations of practicing family medicine in a rapidly changing health care environment. It wasn’t long ago that she finished more than 13 years of patient care in a small family medicine practice in Whitehouse, TX.
Dr. Mullins and co-author Erin Solis, an AAFP regulatory compliance strategist, include checklists written specifically for physicians in small practices, large group practices and virtual groups, as well as a handy overview of the massive Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act.
- Review data in previous reports made available to physicians, such as the all-important quality and resource use report
- Select a reporting method
- Choose quality measures
- Pick improvement activities measures
- Select an advancing care information measure
- Build that final MIPS score.
Having trouble keeping all those QPP terms straight? The playbook provides a list of all the important acronyms right in one place. It also offers a section titled “Understanding Measure Specifications” that takes a deeper dive into some of the more complex details, such as measure numerators and denominators.
Authors’ note: playbook contents are applicable to the 2018 MIPS performance period.