The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to provide flexibilities to clinicians participating in the Quality Payment Program (QPP) Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clinicians significantly impacted by the public health emergency may submit an Extreme & Uncontrollable Circumstances Application to reweight any or all of the MIPS performance categories for performance year 2020. Clinicians requesting relief will need to provide a justification of the impacts to their practice as a result of the public health emergency.

CMS has also added a new COVID-19 clinical trials improvement activity under MIPS. Clinicians can obtain MIPS credit in the following two ways:

• A clinician may participate in a COVID-19 clinical trial and have those data entered into a data platform for that study; or
• A clinician participating in the care of COVID-19 patients may submit clinical COVID-19 patient data to a clinical data registry for purposes of future study.

As a reminder, CMS earlier this year noted that "no data reflecting services provided Jan. 1, 2020 – June 30, 2020 will be used in CMS' calculations for the Medicare quality reporting and value-based purchasing programs in order to reduce providers' data collection and reporting burden as they are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic."

For more information, visit the CMS QPP COVID-19 Response webpage or review the COVID-19 Fact Sheet to learn more about changes to the Quality Payment Program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: ACC Advocacy, Coronavirus, Medicare, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S., COVID-19, Medicaid, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

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