The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has again approved the Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry (Registry) to collect and report quality measure data under the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) for 2019, according to a media release from the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).
The Registry was first approved as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR) in 2017 and continued as a QCDR in 2018.
Registry clients who participate in MIPS can submit their data to CMS directly from the Registry. The Registry contains more QCDR measures than any other physical therapy registry on the market. The information collected and reported will enable the profession to communicate areas of success to other health care providers, patients, and payers. And, information is consistently evaluated and validated through a peer-review process to ensure transparency and acceptability, the release explains.
“The inclusion of qualified physical therapists in the MIPS program marks a major shift in the move toward value-based models of care, and the Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry provides the profession with a powerful tool to meet the challenges and opportunities of that shift,” says APTA President Sharon Dunn, PT, PhD.
“The measures the Registry is qualified to collect and report not only help individual clinicians, but will provide invaluable data that will help patients, payers, and the public better understand the value of physical therapy.”
The Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry directly integrates with multiple third-party electronic health record (EHR) systems to seamlessly and securely transfer data to an unprecedented database of patient episodes. The database will provide profession-wide benchmarking and inform future measure development, and clinical and health services research.
“With the Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry, APTA is looking forward, beyond MIPS data submission. The Registry gives physical therapists (PTs) continual feedback on performance throughout the year so users can better understand their treatment patterns, interventions, and outcomes for specific patient populations, and apply that information to improve their practice. Ultimately, this will benefit the profession as a whole,” states Heather Smith, PT, MPH, director of quality for APTA, the release continues.
[Source: APTA]