The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) is pleased to announce over 1,600 clinicians submitted data to the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) through the ABFM’s online submission process and through the PRIME Patient Data Registry.
The Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) is a quality reporting program that encourages individual eligible professionals and group practices to report information on the quality of care to Medicare. PQRS gives clinicians and group practices the opportunity to assess the quality of care they provide to their patients, helping to ensure that patients get the right care at the right time. The PQRS phases out in 2017 and is folded into the CMS Quality Payment Programs created by the Medicare and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (MACRA). ABFM research demonstrates that family physicians who do their Practice Improvement activities in conjunction with PQRS not only reduce their quality and reporting burdens, but have greater improvement in outcomes. The ABFM is pleased to support so many Diplomates in both regards.
The PRIME Registry Helps Primary Care Clinicians Liberate EHR Data and Prepare for MIPS
The PRIME Registry is a population health and performance improvement tool for clinicians and practices. It extracts patient data from the physician’s electronic health record (EHR) and turns it into actionable measures. PRIME is registered as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry and Specialty Registry open to all primary care physicians—in family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology—as well as physicians assistants and nurse practitioners. Nearly 3,000 primary care clinicians are now using their PRIME Dashboard to track their quality, identify patients with gaps in care, and report their data to wherever they need. The early PRIME users are mostly small and rural practices who would have otherwise struggled to report for PQRS in 2017 and the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) in 2018. A family physician at a micropractice in Winter Park, Colorado, says, “It’s quick, it’s easy and saves money in the long run—it’s slick.” PRIME supports the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus and several other federal payment or practice transformation programs. It is also being configured to support new NCQA PCMH reporting requirements. The ABFM’s Practice Improvement modules will migrate into the PRIME Registry this summer and have been submitted to CMS as MIPS-qualified Practice Improvement activities so Diplomates can look at their quality measures and move directly into planning a PI activity and then report it for MIPS. The ABFM is making every effort to enable PRIME to reduce burden. PRIME works with more than 100 EHRs and has 46 measures available. The ABFM is planning to submit new measures more valuable to primary care, such as continuity and comprehensiveness, so that PRIME users can choose measures they feel are more meaningful and use those MIPS. For more information, go to http://www.primenavigator.org or email PRIME{at}theabfm.org.
- © 2017 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.