Provide Patient Access (Medicaid)

The objective of this measure is the eligible professional (EP) provides patients (or patient-authorized representative) with timely electronic access to their health information and patient-specific education.

This page provides information related to the Medicaid Promoting Interoperability program. If you're looking for Medicare MIPS information, go to Provide Patient Access.

This measure requires a new patient and provider portal in 2019. To learn more about this upgrade, go to eyefinity.com.

Once your practice is migrated to the new patient and provider portal and each clinician is assigned an account, ExamWRITER will automatically send exam information to the patient portal when you finalize the exam. Patients will be notified when a new heath record is available.

Encourage your patients to log into the portal and view their records. Download an instructional flier to help your patients.

An EP must satisfy both measures for this objective through a combination of meeting the thresholds and exclusions:

  • Measure 1. For more than 80 percent of all unique patients seen by the EP, both of the following conditions must be met:
    • The patient (or the patient-authorized representative) is provided timely access to view online, download, and transmit his or her health information; and
    • The provider ensures the patient’s health information is available for the patient (or patient-authorized representative) to access using any application of their choice that is configured to meet the technical specifications of the Application Programming Interface (API) in the provider’s certified EHR.

      At the time of this publication, there are no applications that connect to ExamWRITER through an API. This is an emerging requirement from ONC and CMS, and we expect applications will become available in the future. For now, continue to provide access to patient health information through the patient portal.

      You must finalize the exam within 48 hours of the encounter to earn credit for giving the patient access to the exam information. If you see the patient more than once during the performance period, or even in subsequent performance periods in future years, you must provide timely access each time.

  • Measure 2. The EP must use clinically relevant information from certified EHR to identify patient-specific educational resources and provide electronic access to those materials to more than 35 percent of unique patients seen by the EP during the EHR reporting period.

Denominator

For both of the measures, the denominator is the number of unique patients seen by the EP during the EHR reporting period.

Numerator

  • Measure 1. The number of patients in the denominator (or patient-authorized representative) who are provided timely access to health information to view online, download, and transmit to a third party and to access using an application of their choice that is configured to meet the technical specifications of the API in the EP’s certified EHR.
  • Measure 2. The number of patients in the denominator who were provided electronic access to patient-specific educational resources using clinically relevant information identified from the certified EHR during the EHR reporting period.

Threshold

  • Measure 1. The resulting percentage must be more than 80 percent for an EP to meet this measure.
  • Measure 2. The resulting percentage must be more than 35 percent for an EP to meet this measure.

An EP may take an exclusion for either measure, or both, if either of the following apply:

  • He or she has no office visits during the EHR reporting period.

  • He or she conducts 50 percent or more of his or her patient encounters in a county that does not have 50 percent or more of its housing units with 4 Mbps broadband availability according to the latest information available from the FCC on the first day of the EHR reporting period may exclude the measure.

This measure is required to achieve a promoting interoperability score.

The following are suggested roles for completing this measure:

  • Doctor
  • Technician
  • Scribe
  • Front desk