Radiologists are among dozens of physician groups demanding greater transparency from the federal government in its administration of the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently granted hardship relief for clinicians in the quality payment program, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Groups including the American College of Radiology and Society of Interventional Radiology thanked CMS for that lifesaver but are urging the agency to go further in helping docs navigate MIPS.

In an April 13 letter to the acting head of CMS, physicians asked the feds to “immediately” release benchmark data from 2018-2020, and provide real-time, rolling updates from the current measurement year.

“We are very concerned that CMS has never published MIPS cost measure benchmarks, despite using these metrics to evaluate physician and group performance in the MIPS Cost Performance Category,” ACR, the American Medical Association and numerous others wrote to Administrator Elizabeth Richter. “Because the benchmarks have not been published, physicians cannot compare their spending to the target in the current performance period or prior periods, nor can they determine whether the benchmarks are fair and valid, accounting for variations in resource use that are within a physician’s control.”

The physician groups are “particularly concerned” that the dearth of data could be concealing issues with cost measures or benchmarks. They worry that measures might be capturing “little variation in spending” among the quality program, leading to rads and other docs being penalized for “merely one outlier case.”