Is Your Physician Brand at Risk? How MIPS Can Impact Physician Brand
Jeff Jones, CRPC™
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Whether physicians realize it or not they have been creating a brand every day they’ve been practicing medicine. A physician’s brand is their identifying mark.
A physicians brand is made up of the satisfaction level of their patients. It is the results delivered to patients and should be something physicians are proud of and boast about to get more patients in the door. But how can patients determine a physicians brand?
Typically, patients make decisions on which physicians to see based on past treatments or recommendations from other physicians or family members, but hardly ever use consumerism techniques in order to select a physician. Currently, a physician’s brand isn’t somethings spoken of often or even sought after. So many physicians might wonder if this brand they’ve developed even impacts the number of patients they see.
Branding Meets MIPS
With MIPS these physicians will have to wonder no longer. MIPS scores for all eligible providers are going to be reported on the CMS Physician Compare consumer website. Meaning each eligible provider’s MIPS score and individual category scores will be available for public consumption.
The website will also include the scores of all eligible providers across the country. So not only will patients be able to view the score of their current provider on a 0 to 100 scale, but they will also be able to compare their current provider’s score and category scores to other providers in the area and around the country.
How Things Change
MIPS is not just going to assess providers incentive payments and penalties on their reimbursements, it is also putting providers’ reputations and future clientele on the line.
Healthcare consumers are becoming more choice oriented, and with tools such as these in place, consumers will become more and more likely to utilize them to aid in their healthcare choices. The reputational and consumer-choice impacts on providers could quite possibly overshadow the direct financial impacts of MIPS incentives or penalties. Thus, another reason why MIPS-eligible providers must roll up their sleeves and dig into the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System.
What Can You Do Now?
The best thing MIPS-eligible providers can do now is continue to improve the processes surrounding the individual programs (MU, PQRS, VBM, and CPI) for the remaining of 2016. Again, the first performance year for MIPS is 2017, so each of these programs individual scores will be consolidated into one MIPS score.
It is not enough to successfully attest for Meaningful Use and nothing else. The focus here should be to start aggregating clinical and claims data in an effort to improve quality measures for all programs. The more prepared eligible professionals are for MIPS the less likely they will be dinged with penalties.
Additionally, if a MIPS-eligible provider is a top performer (25th percentile) of MIPS scores they could receive up to a 10% top performance bonus, which is added on to the original incentive payment adjustment. All the more reason to begin honing in on MIPS.