Your Academy joined the AMA and other societies in a letter to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recommending significant improvements to the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) Value Pathways (MVPs) used by CMS. The letter emphasized the need for a more clinically relevant and patient-centered approach, including better alignment of quality and cost measures, and the creation of pathways tailored to chronic conditions and specific specialties. The letter urges CMS to revisit its current MVP framework, which the signatories believe does not fully improve value for Medicare patients, and to make MVP participation optional, with subgroup reporting remaining voluntary.

Key recommendations include:

• Stratifying MVPs by health condition and subspecialty.
• Ensuring quality measures for every major condition, including gaps in existing measures.
• Revising scoring and benchmarking to encourage new measures.
• Better integration of Qualified Clinical Data Registries for continuous feedback and data tracking.
• Revising or removing problematic measures like the Total Per Capita Cost (TPCC).
• Eliminating the Population Health Category and improving measure relevance.
• Retaining voluntary participation in subgroup reporting.

The letter calls for greater collaboration with physicians to ensure measures are meaningful and less burdensome. The organizations stress the importance of a more transparent, inclusive process to better align quality improvement efforts with patient care needs. Read more here. Please reach out to healthpolicy@aapmr.org with any questions or concerns.