The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved three new radiology quality measures under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, officials announced on Monday.
These new measures were developed by a working group of clinicians and provide radiologists with a new opportunity to score incentives, billing company MSN Healthcare Solutions said. Additions relate to coronary calcium scoring, abdominal aortic aneurysm reporting and the thyroid imaging reporting and data system (TI-RADS).
“We think this is significant because radiology has been excessively successful with the MIPS program, and many of the previous measures have topped out or been eliminated,” MSN Executive Director of Quality Payment Programs Claudia Murray said in a Feb. 17 statement.
MIPS was developed by CMS to pay physicians under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. Physicians participating in MIPS receive positive or negative payment adjustments based on their total scores across a range of quality and other measures. CMS has attempted to provide physicians flexibility in participation by allowing them to select the quality measures for scoring along with the mechanism for doing so. This includes everything from claim-based reporting to qualified clinical data registry reporting.
One recent study found that such Medicare performance metrics may favor radiologists in large practices and those in subspecialties, which may hurt general radiologists and impact patient care.
The new measures announced by MSN are titled as follows:
- Screening Coronary Calcium Scoring for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment Including Coronary Artery Calcification Regional Distribution Scoring.
- Screening Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Reporting with Recommendations.
- Use of TI-RADS in Final Report to Stratify Thyroid Nodule Risk.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.