Hospitalists have heard ad infinitum that, starting this year, providers in groups of 100 or more might be penalized in two years by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) value-based payment modifier (VBPM) program, which correlates the cost of services to the quality of those services. And while it is true VBPM won’t apply to individual providers until 2017, HM leaders say now is the time to lobby on what metrics should be considered to determine clinician quality.
“With the speed at which policy becomes reality, we need to start now,” says Gregory Seymann, MD, SFHM, chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. “The trick about the immediacy is that it appears that it’s four years away because 2017 is when it applies to everyone. That’s deceptive; they start measuring performance for 2017 in 2015. The immediacy is real for everyone.”
VBPM: The Next Step
VBPM is a separate program from, but overlaps with, the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS). In essence, PQRS was a pay-for-reporting system that rewarded compliant physicians a 0.5% incentive payment for total Medicare Part B Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) charges for covered services (which means the incentive covers all PFS payments, not just those applied to the services being reported). The landmark Affordable Care Act (ACA) has gone a step further: Nonparticipating physicians will lose 1.5% of allowable Medicare charges beginning in 2015. The reimbursement reduction increases to 2% in 2016.
Once a group is participating in PQRS, VBPM is the next step: a pay-for-quality system that will offers variable rewards for the most efficient providers and a 1% penalty for those groups that fail to participate. Because VBPM sets a two-year time lag between performance year and payment adjustment, the first adjustments in 2015 will be based on data gathered this year.
For the 2015 adjustment, CMS only is looking at results from groups of 100 or more eligible professionals—currently defined as physicians, practitioners, and therapists—under a lone tax identification number (TIN). Hospitalists in large groups or at large academic centers could be eligible, as billing for those physicians often is done in tandem with other specialties, says Dr. Seymann, a member of SHM’s Performance Measurement and Reporting Committee (PMRC). He recommends hospitalists check with administrators to learn if they are in such a group.
Payment adjustments for individual providers will begin in 2017 and likely will be based on a 2015 performance period. PMRC chair Patrick Torcson, MD, MMM, FACP, SFHM, says the time is now for SHM and providers to lobby for the right metrics to be used. Dr. Torcson’s first priority would be for Medicare to recognize HM as its own specialty, as current measures don’t correctly capture the activities on which most hospitalists focus.
“The performance measures that are available for hospitalists really are for general internal medicine and are just left over because we’re lumped in with the internists,” he says. “For example, there may be a heart failure measure or a pneumonia measure, and hospitalists treat a lot of heart failure and pneumonia, but the way that the measure is specified is that it has specifications that can only be reported in the outpatient setting. So the inpatient setting doesn’t allow for a hospitalist to be able to report.”
Suboptimal Measures
Dr. Seymann notes that tailoring measures to patient discharge and transitions of care could provide metrics that would better measure the quality of care provided by hospitalists. SHM and others have lobbied for such metrics, but CMS has not weighed in yet. Dr. Seymann adds CMS has asked for feedback on whether physicians should be allowed to align their reporting with the quality measures required for hospitals’ Inpatient Hospital Quality Reporting (IHQR) measures. SHM has supported the idea, as long as hospitalists aren’t required to report that way.