Health IT grows in significance under final MACRA rule

The final MACRA rule declared on the day of Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services involves a latest Quality Payment Program tying physician payments to quality of care, which will need providers to depend heavily on healthcare IT, in accordance to CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt.

Under the final MACRA rule, Slavitt asserts that the vendor community has a “key” and unprecedented opportunity to assist clinicians to make better the flow of electronic health information and increase the quality of patient care.

Slavitt claimed that several of the provisions in MACRA straightly relate to the use of certified health IT like EHRs, involving the Advancing Care Information performance category under the Quality Payment Program.

Particularly, the document mentions that the Quality Payment Program’s “paths for clinicians and groups—the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the Advanced Alternate Payment Models (Advanced APMs)—require utilization of certified EHR technology to exchange data across providers and with sufferers to support improved care delivery, involving patient engagement and care coordination.”

Slavitt stated that the objectives in the Advancing Care Information performance category of MIPS assert measures that support clinical effectiveness, data security and patient safety, patient engagement, as well as health information exchange. Although, he pointed out that the final MACRA rule doesn’t need reporting on the clinical decision support and computerized physician order entry measures, while decreasing the number of measures clinicians must report to 5 measures that are contended on interoperability—down from eighteen measures in Stage 3 Meaningful Use and from eleven measures in the originally proposed rule for the Quality Payment Program.

In accordance to Slavitt, the concentration is on rewarding high-value, patient-centered care, which will be depicted in $1 billion in payments to providers in the year of 2017 for better quality healthcare. Although, at the similar time, he lamented the logic that technology doesn’t still support physicians in the way that they require.

“For physicians to be victorious in value-based care, it needs latest technology that is convenient to use, easier and more connected, less burdensome and intrusive, that supports the complication of medicine but also simplifies by delivering exactly what sufferers and doctors require when they need it—and no more,” Slavitt stated.

“Instead of prescribing innovation,” he added that vendors should be “targeting to open up the playing field to make solutions that help in value-based care easier.” Interoperability is crucial, summarized Slavitt, who asserted that industry must “launch the ecosystem so that physicians can choose applications that work seamlessly with electronic health records to deal their requirements.”

For its part, ONC’s 2015 Edition Health IT Certification Criteria issued last year will give the HIT foundation for the new Quality Payment Program, involving interoperability-focused standards for certified EHR systems. As part of the 2015 Edition, vendors will be needed to publish application programming interfaces (API) to make it more convenient for software programs like mobile apps to access data from other programs.

The fact sheet of ONC on the new Quality Payment Program and the role of health information technology can be found here.