CMS Releases Final Rule for Second Year of QPP

Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a final rule that makes changes in the second year of the Quality Payment Program (QPP) under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), including the Merit-based Incentive Program (MIPS) and Advanced Payment Models (APMs). The second year of the QPP continues to build on transitional year 1 policies, noting that a “second year to ramp-up the program will continue to help build upon the iterative learning and development of year 1 in preparation for a robust program in year 3.”
In addition to the final rule, CMS also published an interim final rule with comment period to immediately apply an extreme and uncontrollable circumstances policy for providers that were impacted by natural disasters in the 2017 performance period.
Some of the important pieces of the interim final rule include the following:
Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstance Policy
To account for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as other disasters that have occurred during the 2017 MIPS performance period, CMS is establishing in an interim final rule with comment period an automatic extreme and uncontrollable circumstance policy for the quality, improvement activities, and advancing care information performance categories for the 2017 MIPS performance period.
CMS will apply the extreme and uncontrollable circumstance policies for the MIPS performance categories to individual MIPS eligible c...

Source: Policy and Medicine - November 6, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs