From the January 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
As part of MACRA, MIPS aims to bring the basic tenets of "quality over quantity" front and center to radiology, pushing practitioners to collect and interpret their own care delivery data if they want to avoid hits to reimbursement.
According to Pat Free, national vice president for radiology operations for McKesson, some radiologists are
deterred from fully embracing MIPS preparation because they haven’t had experience with Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), or don’t have an administrative infrastructure to develop the program.
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Advanced Data Systems (ADS) introduced its MACRA / MIPS EMR reporting capability for MedicsRIS at the show, and a free MIPS calculator from Innovacer is geared toward helping radiologists crunch their own numbers.
While preparing for MIPS is no picnic, there's no avoiding it — and the sooner it's done the less likely penalties will follow.
Age is just a number
Mammography screening was a red-hot topic at RSNA this year because of the final breast screening guidelines issued by USPSTF in January, which recommend that women between the ages of 50 and 75 with average risk for breast cancer should get mammograms every two years.
In a powerful and candid presentation, Dr. Michael N. Linver, adjunct professor of radiology at the University of New Mexico, made the case that the mortality rate associated with breast cancer for women in their 40s is much higher than the 15 percent reported by the USPSTF — and that even if it weren't, that percentage is still significant.
As for
women over 75, findings presented by Dr. Cindy Lee, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that “the continuing increase of cancer detection rate and positive predictive values in women between the ages of 75 and 90 does not provide evidence for age-based mammography cessation.”
Linver attributed the shortcomings in the USPSTF guidelines, in part, to the fact that there were no radiologists, surgeons or pathologists on the Task Force and that they were influenced by epidemiologists.
Other presentations also took aim at the USPSTF guidelines and highlighted flaws in its approach to quantifying risk. “Considering risk in ten-year age groups obscures important differences between large age-specific subgroups," Robert Smith, ACS vice president of screening,
told another crowd of RSNA attendees.
