Beyond MIPS: A Look into the 90+ Clinical Improvement Activities

Header - Look into 90 activities

Under the MACRA, providers will be reimbursed according to a composite score that reflects how well you’re providing value-based care. This composite score comprises of four key categories: the quality of care you provide, the efficiency of your resource use, meaningful use of EHR, and last but certainly not least, clinical practice improvement activities (CPIA).

 

Image - 90 Clinical Improvement Activities

A rising tide lifts all boats, right? The great part about MIPS—one of the two payment programs as part of MACRA—is that all of these metrics tie-in to improve clinical outcomes and patient engagement. This leads to cost savings, efficient resource use, and improved adoption of your EHR. Maximizing your composite score will not only affect your payments positively, but it will help you provide efficient patient care.

 

Not all activities are created equal

Certain categories are worth more than others due to their impact on patient care. High-weighted activities are worth 20 points, whereas medium-weighted activities value at 10 points. While these CPIAs only account for 15% of your total score, leveraging the highest-weighted tactics can be easy wins for your practice. Planning, completing and reporting 3 activities is much easier to pull off than 6 different initiatives. During your 90-reporting period (here’s a plan for when should start thinking about it), you must achieve 60 points by completing these clinical practice improvement activities in which there are over 90 tactics across 8 categories, in the combination of your choice.

 

Here’s a look at some of the types of activities in each category per ASCRS:

Expanded Practice Access: expanded practice hours, telehealth services, and improving access to services

Population Management: chronic care management programs, community and rural healthcare programs

Care coordination: health information sharing, timely communication and follow-up, care coordination training to handle transitions of care, and active referral management

Beneficiary Engagement: EHR to document patient-reported outcome,enhanced patient portals

Patient Safety and Practice Assessment: ongoing practice assessments and patient safety improvements, and use of tools such as the Surgical Risk Calculator

Achieving Health Equity: seeing new and follow-up Medicaid patients in a timely manner, and use of QCDR for demonstrating performance of processes for screening for social determinants

Emergency Response and Preparedness: participate in disaster medical teams or participation in domestic or international humanitarian volunteer work

Integrated Behavioral and Mental Health: tobacco intervention and smoking cessation, and integration with mental health services.

 

Choosing your activities

With several ways to maximize points in these categories, many activities may overlap and will have a bigger benefit for your patients.

Let’s take the Beneficiary Engagement and Population Management categories for example. You can implement specific programs and protocols to help patients with chronic illness like heart disease and diabetes. Helping patients manage their care at home with blood pressure testing and glucose measurements will help keep them on track and reduce the risk of readmission.

Bonus: Have a tool where patients can electronically share data and communicate with providers.

 

Convenience is king

Anything you can do to make life easier for your patients will most likely be a highly weighted CPIA. Expanding access to care with extended hours or e-visits can significantly decrease appointment cancellations or no-shows. Also, providing 24/7 real-time communication with care teams and reminders will greatly improve patient engagement and overall outcomes.

Another highly weighted activity is participation in CMS’s Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative which aims to help:

  • Exchange patient data information for the best continuity of care
  • Track patients through the entire process and integrate information from specialists to make sure care is documented
  • Coordinate phone calls, communication, navigation post-discharge
  • Communicate timely results for follow-up
  • Create individualized care plans for high-risk patients to share with other providers

 

Attaining Full Credit with Reporting

Given that the entire healthcare industry is shifting towards value-based care, reporting will be one of the most critical components within the continuum of care. If you haven’t already, begin to determine what measures you will report on and evaluate your strengths. Identify what gaps can be filled and put in the necessary plans to improve those gaps. Here at CareSkore, we envision providers getting the credit they deserve.

Through CareSkore, providers can:

  • Generate reports for measures including MACRA, PQRS, and HEDIS
  • Manage your patient population with real-time assessments
  • Understand patient data and quality metrics in order to improve outcomes

Whether it’s reporting for Clinical Improvement Activities or any of the mentioned categories, understanding your patient population through reporting is the first step to cultivating the provider-to-patient relationship.

 

Sources:

MIPS, MACRA & MU - The Next Evolution of Healthcare Payment Reform

MIPS: Clinical Practice Improvement Activities Category

MIPS Program: 2017 Clinical Practice Improvement Category Proposed Rule Guide

Federal Register - Subcategories

Medicare Program; MIPS and APM Incentive Under the Physician Fee Schedule

Transforming Clinical Practice Incentives

 

I Will Keep Them From Harm and Injustice (Part 1)

Part 1: Identifying and Reducing Readmissions Rates

Oliver Leung CareSkore

 

It’s no secret that America’s health care system needs intensive care. $180 billion is wasted every year on operational inefficiencies, and the condition is not improving. This is largely attributed to a fee-based system that incentivized volume over value.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act made health care providers an offer they couldn’t refuse — a mandate to increase efficiency or feel the pain of stiff financial penalties. This ideology shifted the practice from fee for service to value-based care. Loved it or loathed it, health care providers are forced to play with the cards they were dealt with.

As with all illnesses, we begin with identifying the symptoms of a broken health care system, so we can follow through with a diagnosis and treatment. In this ten-part series, we will:

  • Identify the most pressing challenges facing our health care system
  • Address opportunities for improvements, and
  • Make recommendations for enhancements

Finding solutions to fix our health care system won’t be resolved overnight, but it is prudent to focus on the elements that are causing inefficiencies. Then implement noninvasive solutions that are quick, intelligent, and cost-effective.

 

Challenge #1: Readmission

When our vehicle breaks down, we go to the mechanic to get it fixed. We expect our vehicle to function after our visit because it is part of a mechanic’s duty of care.

Similarly, a doctor’s obligation is to treat patients with a level of care that is consistent with the Hippocratic Oath. Unlike a machine, however, humans can’t be recalled. We either heal, deteriorate or perish. Readmissions are a serious threat to not only our health but to our health care system.

By far, Medicare bears the greatest burden of readmission and is the gold standard by which health care providers measure performance on. The three greatest preventable conditions for Medicare readmissions are:

  1. Congestive heart failure (24.5%)
  2. Septicemia (21.3%)
  3. Pneumonia (17.9%)

The conditions above cost hospitals over $4.3 billion. The government (and ultimately the taxpayer) foots 43% of our national health bill. Consequently, hospital reimbursements have recently been restructured under the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) in October 2012. The program focuses on patients who are readmitted within 30 days for high-cost or high-volume conditions and procedures. Specifically, heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), hip/knee replacement, and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG).

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program is designed to improve the quality of care by incentivizing the reduction of hospital readmissions and penalizing underperforming hospitals.

 

Oliver Leung CareSkore Readmission Rates

 

Since the initiation of the program, readmission rates have declined 1%, from more than 19.0% to less than 18.0%. Although this is an improvement, 50% of hospitals received readmission penalties of up to 3% for failing to meet the national readmission benchmark.

The financial cost is merely a symptom of the problem. Readmitted patients are preventable and increase demand for doctors who already have long waitlists. It also places a hindrance on society since patients are required to take repeated time off work or home care. In short, remitted patients are not given the proper treatment, which is simply poor quality of care.

 

Opportunity: Preventing Readmission

Readmission rates are calculated using discharge data for each hospital from the three years prior to the year in which the penalty is assessed. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), The two criteria for evaluating the impact of readmissions are volume and costs. To understand the impact of these variables, we need to look at the data that drives the numbers.

The average readmission rate for the top ten high volume conditions among Medicare beneficiaries is 19.6%. Simply put, nearly 1 in 5 patients return for preventable retreatments.

However, the quality of care is not solely dependent on hospital care. Hospitals serve patients of varying risk profiles. External factors such as socioeconomic status and demographics come into play and should be taken into consideration.

Despite these discrepancies, there are currently no provisions in the Health care Readmissions Reduction Program to account for these external factors. This could adversely (and often unfairly) impact the perception of a health care provider. These external data sets are largely unaccounted for but have a significant impact on patient readmission.

 

Recommendations: Patient-centered care.

There are ways to mitigate the risk of patient readmission. It begins with intimately knowing your patient. This may sound daunting at first, but it can be easier than you think.

The difference between a stranger and a loved one is data. With a friend, you know what appeals to them as much as what repulses them.

In the same way, health care providers can leverage data to determine whether a patient is considered at risk of readmission. But data itself is inert. It can’t predict and won’t prevent readmissions on its own. Therefore, health care providers need to aggregating and normalizing the data in order to understand the probability of readmission. Only then can you make accurate decisions.

Finally, patients need to be nurtured throughout their medical journey. Patient engagement is like following through on your golf or tennis swing. It takes practice, but it will certainly improve your game.

It starts with asking, “How have you been?” It’s simple, but not easy. Engaging your patients is very involving and can take tremendous resources from your admin staff. So new technologies such as CareSkore actively engages patients using artificial intelligence (A.I.) to prevent readmissions from occurring.

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…”
Reducing readmissions isn’t a trivial task, but it is one that deserves attention. Readmissions prevent doctors from seeing fresh patients, disrupts the wellbeing of a patient, and drives costs to health care providers. There are early indicators that the health care industry is adopting methods to reduce readmissions. Not only because it is mandated by the government, but because prevention is better than treatment. Solutions are available to transform hospitals from a destination to a journey.