The medical world is full of acronyms: ICD-10, MU, FACS. As we approach the start of a new year, one in particular has been a topic of many recent conversations in medical practices and hospitals: PQRS.

The Physician Quality Reporting System began in 2007 as a health care quality improvement initiative established by the federal agency Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It allows physicians to earn an incentive payment for reporting on a small subset of clinical quality measures identified as industry best practices for patient care.

PQRS incentive payments just for providing quality patient care sounds like an extra Christmas gift for doctors and practices, right? Not quite. Failure to meet CMS’s quality thresholds, as well as the failure to report entirely, will result in payment adjustments subtracted from providers’ Medicare reimbursement in 2017. Sounds like they’re receiving a lump of coal from CMS!

However, medical practices can still stay off CMS’s naughty list and avoid penalties next year. pMD can easily set up PQRS measures and record data electronically with our mobile charge capture software.

Here at pMD, we can build PQRS prompts right into the charge capture process. Practices choose their quality measures based on their specialty, then pMD builds logic to display those measures for qualifying patients. For example, if a doctor chooses to report on Measure #117: Diabetes Eye Exam, when she enters a charge for a patient with diabetes, she’s prompted to indicate if the patient had an eye exam within the past year.

pMD’s method of PQRS data capture is real-time and logic-based. This means doctors are presented with clinical best practices while still caring for their patients, and they only need to address measures relevant to the patient they are treating. Real-time data capture also saves hours of practices’ time, since they won’t be scrambling to sort through a year’s worth of data at the end of the reporting period -- they can enjoy the holidays instead!

Preparing for PQRS in 2015 may seem like a visit from Scrooge, but if a group selects the quality measures most applicable to their specialty and plans to capture data in an easy, efficient way at point of care, they will avoid penalty fees, earn upward Value Modifier payment adjustments, and, most importantly, ensure they are providing the highest quality of care to every patient they see in the new year.