The 2011 requirements for reporting clinical quality measures (CQM) for Meaningful Use will remain the same in 2012. That is, hospitals, critical access hospitals and eligible professionals can report outcomes via attestation and by calculating the measures by using meaninfgul-use-certified electronic health records (EHRs), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) clarifies in separate upcoming proposed rules.
In one of the proposals on hospital outpatient payments and hospital value-based purchasing--to be published in the Federal Register July 18--hospitals are encouraged to participate in a proposed electronic reporting pilot to help advance EHR-based reporting in the hospital-related quality programs, CMS says.
In the second proposed rule on physician fee schedule payment policies--which will be published in the July 19 Federal Register--CMS notes that it initially called for CQMs to be electronically submitted in 2012. But CMS' final rule for Stage 1 of the Medicare EHR incentive program left the door open for another year of attestation if the agency isn't ready to accept electronic measures, reports Health Data Management.
Well guess what? CMS has "determined that it is not feasible to receive electronically the information necessary" for CQM "under the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative registry XML specification."
As a result, the agency wants to modify the requirement that CQM reporting happen electronically: For the 2012 payment year, eligible providers may continue to report CQM results as calculated by certified EHR technology by attestation--as in the 2011 payment year.
For more information:
- view the Federal Register proposed CMS hospital rules
- view the Federal Register proposed CMS rule on physician payment
- read the Health Data Management article