CMS released preliminary Quality Payment Program data for the 2019 performance year on Oct. 27.
Six things to know:
1. There are two pathways for eligible clinician participation in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act's Quality Payment Program: the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS, and the Advanced Alternative Payment Model, or Advanced APM.
2. CMS said 97.4 percent of clinicians eligible to participate in MIPS did so in 2019
3. More than 85 percent of clinicians in small practices participated in MIPS in 2019.
4. The number of physicians participating in Advanced APMs increased from 183,306 in 2018 to 195,564 in 2019.
5. Due to the COVID-19 national emergency, CMS reopened the 2019 extreme and uncontrollable circumstances application to allow clinicians and medical groups to request reweighting of the MIPS performance categories to 0 percent.
6. More than 65,000 MIPS-eligible clinicians received reweighting of one or more performance categories due to the extreme and uncontrollable circumstances policy. Of those, 29,136 received reweighting of all of the performance categories and were assigned a neutral score.