CMS News Center

CMS Launches Online Tool to Assist With Quality Payment Program

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a tool to share electronic data for the Medicare Quality Payment Program (QPP). This new release is the first in a series that will be part of CMS’ ongoing efforts to spur the creation of innovative, customizable tools to reduce burden for clinicians while also supporting high-quality care for patients, officials said. In October, CMS released the QPP website (https://qpp.cms.gov) to help clinicians understand the program and successfully participate. Today’s release, commonly referred to as an application program interface (API), builds on that site by making it easier for other organizations to retrieve and maintain the QPP’s measures and enable them to build applications for clinicians and their practices. The API, available on the QPP site, will allow developers to write software using the information described on the “Explore Measures” section of the QPP site. Based on interviews with clinicians, CMS created the “Explore Measures” tool, which enables clinicians and practice managers to select measures that likely fit their practice, assemble them into a group, and print or save them for reference. Already, tens of thousands of people are using this tool, according to CMS.

“The API released today will continue CMS’ focus on user-driven design by providing developers and our partners the opportunity to turn our data into powerful applications,” said Kate Goodrich, MD, director of the CMS Centers for Clinical Standards and Quality. CMS is committed to collaborating with the organizations that doctors trust to make their lives easier while supporting their efforts to improve the quality of care across America.”

Several groups have applauded the release of this information, according to CMS, including the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement, the American College of Radiology, the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the National Rural Accountable Care Consortium.

“The ACP supports the efforts of CMS to design and share publicly accessible interfaces that help simplify the process of physician participation in the Quality Payment Program,” said Nitin S. Damle, MD, MS, MACP, president of the ACP. “These efforts are aligned with ACP’s ongoing efforts to help equip physicians with tools and support needed to transform from volume-based to value-based patient-centered care.”

Through streamlined policy and improved technology and operations, the QPP is modernizing Medicare to “pay smarter for better care.” The QPP is designed to reduce reporting burden on clinicians so they can focus on their patients while providing useful information to clinicians and other stakeholders in an effort to improve overall care quality. As the program and its supporting website mature, CMS will continue to release data and APIs to spur innovation and keep participants up-to-date, officials said. 

CMS Finalizes Measures Under Consideration for Pre-Rulemaking

Each year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes a list of quality and cost measures under consideration for Medicare quality- and value-based purchasing programs and collaborates with the National Quality Forum (NQF) to get critical input from multiple stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, commercial payers, and purchasers, on the measures that are best suited for these programs. This year’s “Measures Under Consideration (MUC) List” contains 97 measures that have the potential to drive improvement in quality across numerous settings of care. CMS is considering new measures for nursing homes, hospitals, clinician practices, and dialysis facilities, among other settings, and continues to focus on important measures of patient outcomes, appropriate use of diagnostics and services, cost, and patient safety. Outcome measures make up 39% of measures on the MUC list.

An increased number of measures were submitted for consideration by specialty societies. For more information, visit www.cms.gov.