How Did Group Practices Perform in the First Year of Medicare's MIPS program?

VSSL director Joshua Liao and colleagues recently published an analysis of performance among group practices in the first year of Medicare's Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) program. As Dr. Liao and team note:

"Medicare engages over 900,000 clinicians nationwide who care for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. MIPS evaluates clinicians based on activities in four domains: quality, resource use, promoting interoperability (use of health information technology), and improvement activities. Performance in these domains is combined into a “composite performance score” (CPS), which is used to adjust clinicians’ overall Medicare payment rates. These adjustments can be significant, ranging from 5% in 2020 to 9% in 2022 and beyond."

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The study team found that overall, 64% of MIPS practices received a positive payment adjustment while 0.6% received no adjustment and 35.3% received a negative adjustment. The mean/median CPS was 44/40, with a large proportion of

practices (8,006) receiving scores of 0.

Several practice characteristics varied by MIPS performance. In particular, compared to low performers, positive performers were larger, multi-specialty practices with larger patient populations. Characteristics of the communities served by practices also varied by performance group.

Read the full paper here.