Augusta Care Partners participates in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) as a Track 1 Accountable Care Organization (ACO). Track 1 ACO participating practices (like yours!) are assessed under MIPS using the Alternative Payment Model (APM) Scoring Standard. This means that all of our participating practices receive the same MIPS score.
What Is MIPS, and what does MIPS have to do with my practice?
The Merit Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) is Medicare’s medical reimbursement framework for Part B payments. Based on your performance in MIPS in 2017, your payments for Medicare Part B services will be adjusted up or down in 2019.
Your MIPS performance is scored across 3 categories for 2017:
- Quality – Augusta Care Partners takes care of this reporting for you
- Improvement Activities – You automatically score 100% in this domain because you participate in an ACO
- Advancing Care Information – These “meaningful use” metrics were reported at the practice level. CMS then took all of our participating practice scores and created a weighted average score for this domain.
So… How did we do?
We are pleased to report that based on our current MIPS score, all ACP’s practices will receive a positive 1.42% payment adjustment in 2019 for Medicare Part B services! Our score breakdown is below, but please note that ACP earned a PERFECT QUALITY SCORE!
Additionally, we anticipate that the payment adjustment percentage may increase prior to January 1, 2019. CMS recently shared that there is a “known issue” with scoring calculations for the Advancing Care Information category, and we are working with CMS to ensure that our score accurately captures performance for that domain. We will provide updates as soon as CMS makes them available. CMS has not made any comparative data available, so we do not know how other ACOs performed. We have, however, heard through one of the national ACO organizations that ACOs with perfect MIPS scores are reporting that they earned just above a 2% positive adjustment.