Just because you may have reported quality measures to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2013 doesn’t mean that the data necessarily stayed in 2013. Instead, those data, whether submitted or not under the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) and applied to certain practices by CMS under the Value-Based Payment Modifier (VM), may be impacting your practice’s bottom line today. CMS issued two reports earlier this year detailing eligible professional (EP) performance in PQRS 2013 and the VM. On a positive note, more than seven in 10 physician anesthesiologists participated in 2013. However, while PQRS is a clear program of incentives and payment adjustments (penalties), the application of the VM fmay appear more ambiguous.
Let’s first examine the most recent CMS publication on PQRS reporting rates. Since the inception of PQRS in 2007, physician anesthesiologists have consistency ranked as one of the top specialties who report quality...
