AQuIRE - Physician Quality Reporting System

Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS)

What Is PQRS?
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quality initiative, Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), formerly called Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), is an incentive payment program for eligible professionals who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered professional services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. PQRS is voluntary in 2012-2014.

Measures and Measure Groups for Chest Medicine
For 2012, determine which PQRS reporting option in each category best fits your practice:
A.     Select either claims-based or registry-based reporting.
B.     Select either three individual measures or a measures group.

The applicable measure groups for chest medicine are Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (COPD), Sleep Apnea, Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP), and/or Asthma. COPD and Sleep Apnea measure groups are new for 2012. http://www.cms.gov/pqrs

What Is the Financial Incentive for PQRS?
The 2012 incentive payment will be 0.5% of all allowed Medicare charges for Medicare Part B physician fee schedule-covered professional services, not just on the claims where the performance measures quality data codes are applied. Physician practices not currently participating are foregoing available incentive payments. A penalty for not participating in PQRS will begin in 2015. There will be a 1.5% reduction in all Medicare fee-for-service payments in 2015. If your practice is not already reporting PQRS, consider implementing participation as soon as possible, and certainly by January 1, 2012.

How to Report
Specifications of the 2012 PQRS performance measures are detailed here.

We have also provided additional information, along with a form specific to chest physicians for claims-based reporting. See the Quality Claims Reporting Form.

In addition to the traditional reporting methods, chest physicians can use the PQRIwizard. See information below on “What Is PQRIwizard?”

Download the CAP PQRIwizard Data Collection Instrument

What Is PQRIwizard?
The PQRIwizard is a fast, convenient, and cost-effective online tool to help collect and report quality measure data for the CMS PQRS incentive payment program. Similar to online tax preparation software, the PQRIwizard helps guide you through a few easy steps to help rapidly collect, validate, report, and submit the results to CMS for payment. The PQRIwizard is powered by the CECity Registry™, a CMS-qualified registry for PQRI reporting.

Why use PQRIwizard?

• Maximize your PQRS incentive
• Automatic data validation
• Minimize data entry time (Requires as few as 30 patient records)
• Eliminate claims and coding

Many PQRS registries require that you collect data from 80% of all of your eligible Medicare patients. The PQRIwizard simplifies the entire process by using the measure group approach. Using the PQRIwizard, you only have to collect 30^a patient visits from the entire year to complete your report!

Plus, PQRIwizard has a built-in Progress Monitor that checks for missing data to validate your report. The Progress Monitor tracks your data to provide you with continuous feedback regarding valid patients, and provides an alert when you have met all submission criteria and your data is ready to be reviewed and submitted. The system even calculates your measures and provides a printable report of your measure results in real time.

How Do I Participate?
Use the PQRIwizard to submit your PQRS data. All you need to do is register, select the CAP measure group, and then answer a few questions per patient. PQRIwizard takes the guessing out of PQRI participation–just follow the simple steps and let the wizard do the rest!

How Much Does It Cost to Participate?
The cost is $249 per physician.

Where Do I Register?
Register here

The ACCP encourages all practices to participate in PQRS. If you have any PQRS-related questions, please contact Marla Brichta at mbrichta@chestnet.org or (847) 498-8364.

For questions regarding the PQRIwizard, please e-mail Jeff Maitland at jmaitland@chestnet.org.

NOTE: Submission of data to CMS is not a guarantee of payment by CMS.

^a You will need to collect 30 Medicare patient visits that do need not be consecutive patients as CMS formerly required.