Sponsored by MedicFusion
The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) is a primary care model designed to revolutionize healthcare and how it is delivered to patients.
The healthcare home can be a natural fit for chiropractic by allowing DCs to partner with other healthcare professions and offer customized, holistic care. Healthcare homes allow patients to receive care from a team of providers who share a common goal. This team may be part of the same organization or may function as a network of providers cooperating to provide patients with relevant services using referrals.¹
Patients provide the direction by becoming directly involved in their own care plans and deciding how their healthcare team cares for them in line with their culture, beliefs, and values.
Patient experience
Healthcare that fits patients’ values is sensitive to their needs. Healthcare homes are interested in improving the healthcare experience for patients. By forming valuable relationships, healthcare homes connect patients to necessary healthcare services within their communities. Healthcare homes also strive to be more accessible to patients by offering services with shorter wait times, enabling direct communication with providers and improved access to urgent services.¹
Patients are empowered to ask questions, obtain the information they need and make care decisions. As the community healthcare system improves, information about best practices is shared with other providers in order to make patient experience and health even better. Performance is measured, patient satisfaction is studied and providers use clinical-decision support to advance healthcare.¹
The Quality Payment Program
A new piece of healthcare legislation called the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) is changing how Medicare works. MACRA is redefining how Medicare providers are reimbursed. This new system, the Quality Payment Program (QPP), has two tracks.
The first, the Merit-Based Payment System (MIPS), has providers report certain quality metrics about their practice and offers incentives to high performers and penalizes the worst-performing clinics. The second program creates Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs) that receive special additional incentives. The majority of providers start in the MIPS program before becoming eligible to participate as an APM.²
Both models reward patient improvement with higher reimbursements. One of the MIPS scoring categories is Advancing Care Information (ACI), which was formerly called meaningful use. ACI hopes to make meaningful use more flexible and relevant to how providers use technology and treat their patients. A higher ACI score helps your practice achieve higher reimbursements.²
ACI and the future of Medicare
As Medicare unveiled the ACI program, the intent and importance behind these changes was clarified. Based on conversations with provider and patient stakeholders, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is working to reduce the burden created by meaningful use and create a better measure of technology use. Meaningful Use brought providers towards this goal, with ACI taking Medicare forward.³
ACI offers choices of metrics, simplified reporting, fewer metrics to report, and more than one way to successfully achieve a high score. This represents a departure from the meaningful use of the past. Greater emphasis is placed on patient access to their electronic records. Interoperability is a strong focus, as transferring information between clinics and with different specialties becomes more routine.
How your EHR use is evaluated becomes more closely related to how you actually use EHR everyday in your practice. These changes are designed to improve patient care by making the reporting process simpler and more practical. ³
For your patients, this may lead to better care. By restoring the focus to patient experience and health, ACI may make Medicare reporting that much easier.
About Medicfusion
Medicfusion, a subsidiary of VSS Medical Technologies, Inc. is a certified EHR for chiropractors. Since its inception in 2002, Medicfusion has been focused on providing a certified EHR to professionals seeking an easy-to-use paperless system with superior customer support. Medicfusion has an extensive range of features including automated workflows, patient web portal, electronic prescribing, electronic payments, clinical documentation (SOAP notes), comprehensive reporting, online training resources, etc.
On November 11, 2015, Medicfusion EHR achieved Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC-HIT) 2014 Edition Complete Certification via Drummond Group, an Authorized Certification Body (ACB) that has been empowered to test software for compliance with the requirements of the federal government’s program. This stamp of approval designates that the software offers functionality that enables eligible providers and hospitals to meet Stage 1 and Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements, qualifying these organizations to receive payments under the ongoing EHR adoption program.
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References
¹pcmh.ahrq.gov.”Defining the PCMH.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.pcmh.ahrq.gov/page/defining-pcmh. Accessed: October 2016.
²qpp.cms.gov. “Quality Payment Program.” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. https://qpp.cms.gov. Accessed: October 2016.
³Slavitt, A and DeSalvo, K. “Moving toward improved care through information.” The CMS Blog. https://blog.cms.gov/2016/04/27/moving-toward-improved-care-through-information/. Published: April 2016. Accessed: October 2016.
