The Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) was designed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to improve the quality of patient care. It required eligible practitioners to submit additional information to CMS about the care they provided.
As of January 1, 2017, the PQRS system is no longer applicable. TherapyNotes no longer offers the ability to add PQRS codes to notes for any appointment occurring January 1, 2017 or later.
If enabled, you may continue to add PQRS codes to the footer of notes for appointments occurring before January 1, 2017. As a reminder, all claims containing PQRS data must be received by CMS no later than February 24, 2017 to be considered for the 2016 reporting period.
PQRS is being replaced by the Quality Payment Program, which consists of two tracks: the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs). Very few of our users will fall under APMs. Most will fall under MIPS.
MIPS is intended to reduce the reporting burden on eligible providers and overhauls the reporting requirements. Psychologists and most other behavioral health providers will not be required to report MIPS data until 2019, although CMS is willing to accept "test" data submissions prior to then. We are continuing to monitor ongoing changes to MIPS rules and submission criteria and will update TherapyNotes accordingly.
For those users who are required to submit MIPS data in 2017 (primarily psychiatrists and other prescribers), we encourage you to sign up with an appropriate registry to submit your data.