Selecting Measures
Beginning in 2015, measure selection took on a whole new meaning. No longer was it “ok” to simply pick a few measures that your EHR could easily capture the data and send the results off to CMS. Where once you were paid for reporting, P4R, now with the Value Modifier, we are officially in the world of pay for performance, P4P. It’s actually a world that we call P4Q or Pay for Quality, and now you actually must pass measures!
The USWR reports 20 measures that are specific to wound care and hyperbaric medicine which were developed by the USWR, as well as 24 standard PQRS measures that are at least tangentially relevant to practice in an outpatient wound care department. Providers may “mix and match” any of these 44 measures in order to find 9 measures that they can pass.
Intellicure EHR™ supports all 44 of the measures reported by the USWR, and perhaps more importantly, Intellicure has developed Clinical Decision Support rules (CDS) to help clinicians pass those measures. Some measures are more advanced than others and have been developed with the future in mind, so for 2016 I have selected 16 measures (8 standard PQRS measure and 8 USWR measures) from which Intellicure clients can chose to create their PQRS dashboard. Eligible providers (EPs) do not have to activate all 16 of the CDS “clinical suggestions” within the EHR. Some may not be relevant to a particular EPs practice. For example, there are 3 measures that are specific to hyperbaric medicine and one specific to the use of cellular products. If an EP does not practice hyperbaric oxygen therapy or doesn’t use cellular products, they would not select those measures. Remember the following rules apply when selecting PQRS measures:
- You need to PASS 9 measures (so, pick at least 11 to have some fallback measures in case you fail one or two)
- You need to have measures from 3 of the 6 strategy domains. I have color coded them by domain. You need 3 different colors in your final list.
- You need one cross cutting measure. That should not be hard since on the list below there are 7 cross-cutting measures.
Intellicure clients will have access to proprietary information explaining in detail the CDS for each measure and how to document compliance within Intellicure so that you can demonstrate success with the measure. However, in the coming weeks I will provide a rationale for some of the measures below and why I chose them.
Caroline Fife, MD
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Dr. Fife is a world renowned wound care physician dedicated to improving patient outcomes through quality driven care. Please visit my blog at CarolineFifeMD.com and my Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/carolinefifemd/videos
The opinions, comments, and content expressed or implied in my statements are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the position or views of Intellicure or any of the boards on which I serve.
