MGMA's advocacy wishlist part 2

The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) has been a perennial thorn in the side of practices and getting rid of it and finding a better way is just one of the priorities for physician advocacy organizations this year.

Anders Gilberg, senior vice president for government affairs at MGMA, discusses what else the organization and their political partners are going to try and get passed.

Transcript:

Anders Gilberg: Another another issue that, is just critical to is, there are a lot of, I think, well-intended, efforts to, have physicians report quality measures and to get involved in quality reporting programs in the federal programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

But the Medicare program called the merit based Incentive Payment System, the MIPs program. It's largely seen as an onerous government program. And, I think in many ways, we may just have to get rid of it and reset and try to figure out a new way to work to improve quality in the Medicare program. That isn't just an exercise and administrative hassle recording things that the doctor's already doing, but, you know, sending that all to the federal government. there's also a lot of health information technology issues and issues relating cybersecurity. Some of the things that we experienced with the debacle with Change Healthcare last year, where, I mean, there were just a minority of practices in our membership that weren't affected and claims completely dried up when there was a cyber attack on Change Healthcare, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group. And, and ultimately, even if our members didn't have contracts with change as their clearinghouse, a lot of their clearinghouses that they do have contracts with use change on the back end. So everything just shut down.

And so I think taking a look at both cybersecurity as well as should we really have that degree of consolidated power in our healthcare system Stem to, if there is a situation where there's a cyber attack like that, that it can't just grind the system down to a complete halt. So those are some things off the top of my head. In addition to maintaining access to telehealth, you know, their physician workforce issues that are still always relevant. Those are some of the things at the beginning of each year that we put forward as our advocacy agenda, and people can get that on our website. We also have one pagers where we get into each issue. in terms of our policies on each issue, and if people are interested, they can explore that more. But that's, you know, the 10,000 foot level that, you know, we're looking at as we kind of move into the new administration in Congress.