As hospitals and providers continue to struggle in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CMS has announced several efforts to provide assistance under the Promoting Interoperability Programs and Quality Payment Program.
For the Quality Payment Program, CMS had previously extended the deadline for MIPS eligible clinicians to submit data and reopened the application period for MIPS eligible clinicians to file for a hardship exception for the 2019 payment year. Additionally, CMS announced that any individual MIPS eligible clinician who did not submit data or which submitted data for only one performance category for the 2019 payment year by April 30 will automatically receive a neutral payment instead of a negative payment adjustment (this “extreme and uncontrollable circumstances” policy is not available to groups/virtual groups). If a MIPS eligible clinician is able to submit data, CMS noted that the data submission would override the automatic “extreme and uncontrollable circumstances” policy and the clinician could be eligible for negative, neutral or positive payment adjustments based on the data submission.
CMS also announced a new COVID-19 Clinical Trials Improvement Activity for the MIPS 2020 performance period. MIPS eligible clinicians may receive credit if they participate in a COVID-19 clinical trial that utilizes a drug or biologic for treating COVID-19 infections and reporting their findings through a clinical data repository or registry. CMS noted that,
“The new improvement activity provides flexibility in the type of clinical trial, which could include designs ranging from the traditional double-blinded placebo-controlled trial to an adaptive design, or pragmatic design that flexes to workflow and clinical practice context. The goal is to support innovation and improve the collection of COVID-19 related data that clinicians have available to them and develop best practices that can drive improvements in patient care as clinicians monitor and manage the spread of COVID-19 in their practices. Encouraging clinicians to use an open source data collection tool will bring the results of their research to the forefront of healthcare much faster, leading to improvements in care delivery and most importantly the health of COVID-19 patients.”
For the Promoting Interoperability Programs, CMS has extended the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) to file for a hardship exception for the Promoting Interoperability Programs 2019 payment year. The deadline has been extended for eligible hospitals to September 1 and for CAHs November 30 due to COVID-19. Hospitals may be eligible to file a hardship exception and avoid negative payment adjustments if they were unable to comply with program requirements for the 2019 payment year. The application can be found here.
For the Quality Payment Program, additional information about efforts CMS has taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be located here.
