The American College of Radiology strongly opposes the new changes proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System of 2022.
CMS revealed these updated for the first time in July 2021 as a part of the proposed fee schedule for physicians. ACR is displeased that the MIPS might withdraw two of its quality measurements related to radiology, with some options already restricted for this specialty.
The professional society updated on Aug 18, 2021, “The volume of measures made available to the radiologists is reduced significantly over the past few years of this MIPS program while the ACR is eager to repulse against the eradication of more radiology measures.”
Agency officials have been trying to retire measure 195 of the MIPS, covering various stenosis measurements in the carotid imaging and 225 reports, related to the reminder system for mammography screening. ACR also saved strong words for the other proposal to eliminate the bonus points associated with high-priority additional measures. Doing this encouraged medical professionals and experts to adopt the innovative non-benchmarked measures, while giving a pathway to the specialty to improve the scores of MIPS, despite all measures to cap or remove from this program.
Advocated further criticized the CMS proposal to increase the completeness of data threshold for an overall quality measure of 80%.
According to the college, “The ACR firmly believes that this is a steep rise and this might prove to be difficult for rural and small practices. Rather, the ACR also encourages CMS that it should increase the threshold gradually.”
Meanwhile, the ACR also voiced its support for another program to increase the ceiling score for the latest measurements in the first 2 years of its existence. However, it also wants the timeline to bump up to a minimum of three years, with the belief that it takes longer for the measure to attain the adoption level and allow the MIPS benchmark. In addition, the American College of Radiology also said that it plans to present a detailed report to the relevant agency by September 2021.
Advanced equipment with precise imaging solutions is the requirement for anyone who has to undergo a diagnostic imaging procedure. At sepstream®, you can find the most sophisticated software solutions for medical imaging. We use advanced AI algorithms for the best quality and faultless results.