Are Quality Scores in the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services Merit-based Incentive Payment System Associated With Outcomes After Outpatient Orthopaedic Surgery?

CONCLUSION: We found that the rates of unplanned hospital visits after outpatient orthopaedic surgery among Medicare beneficiaries were low and primarily driven by emergency department visits. We additionally found only a small association between MIPS quality scores for individual physicians and the risk of an unplanned hospital visit after outpatient orthopaedic surgery. These findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing postoperative emergency department visits may be the best target to reduce overall postoperative unplanned hospital visits and that the MIPS program should be eliminated or modified to more strongly link reimbursement to risk-adjusted patient outcomes, thereby better aligning incentives among patients, surgeons, and the Centers for Medicare ad Medicaid Services. Future work could seek to evaluate the association between MIPS scores and other surgical outcomes and evaluate whether annual changes in MIPS score weighting are independently associated with clinician performance in the MIPS and regarding clinical outcomes.LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III, therapeutic study.PMID:38513092 | DOI:10.1097/CORR.0000000000003033
Source: Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research - Category: Orthopaedics Authors: Source Type: research