Taking Advantage of Small-Practice Accommodations

CMS recognizes that small practices (15 or fewer clinicians) will have a harder time meeting MIPS and Quality Payment Program requirements than larger practices. To help, the Quality Payment Program has implemented a number of special scoring scenarios just for small practices:

• Earn double points for each improvement activity automatically.
• Earn 6 bonus points in the quality category for submitting at least one measure.
• Earn 3 points (instead of zero) for quality measures that don’t meet data completeness or case minimum requirements, or that can’t be reliably scored against a benchmark.
• Automatic reweighting of the promoting interoperability category to 0%. Unless you choose to submit promoting interoperability data, small practice performance is distributed across the following categories:
  • Quality (40%)
  • Improvement activities (30%)
  • Cost (30%)

    

• Automatic rewighting of the Cost category to 0% when no cost measures apply to your scope of practice. When promoting interoperability and cost are both reweighted to zero, performance is equally distributed between the quality and improvement activities categories.
• Qualify for a different redistribution policy when the promoting interoperability performance category is reweighted.