MACRA and Your Practice
Total HIPAA is partnering with NueMD and Smartlink Mobile to conduct a series of live webinars on health care compliance for small medical practices and billing companies. Join us as we discuss what you need to know about the new MACRA regulations and provide actionable tips to help you succeed.
The first live webinar, MACRA and Your Practice, will be this Thursday, March 16th at 2:00 pm EDT.
The presentation will last 1 hour, including time for Questions and Answers.
The presenters will examine MACRA legislation and its influence on the workflow in your organization. You will also gain insight into the steps to succeed under MACRA. The presenters will give you the tools for the new reporting requirements and how the requirements will affect HIPAA compliance.
As another plus, the content of this webinar has been approved by the Professional Association of Healthcare Office Management (PAHCOM) as eligible for 1 CEU credit.
Guest Speakers
Ginny Mahaney – VP, Products & Marketing – Smartlink Mobile
Ginny Mahaney is a subject matter expert on MACRA and is responsible for product strategy of Smartlink’s MACRA Suite. Her background includes a variety of product management, marketing, and business development roles in healthcare companies including Allscripts, Parata Systems, and Sutter Corporation (a subsidiary of Columbia/HCA). Ginny earned her bachelor’s degree from The Pennsylvania State University with an emphasis in PreVet/PreMed and an MBA from Duke University.
Autumn Bell – Senior Project Coordinator – NueMD
Autumn Bell is a senior project manager at NueMD and the company’s resident expert on all things MACRA. In her role, Autumn is responsible for staying current on new healthcare legislation and helping her team design and implement creative solutions to keep her clients in compliance.
Jason Karn – Chief Compliance Officer – Total HIPAA
Co-author of Total HIPAA’s Training and Compliance Solutions, frequent national speaker on HIPAA, and a HIPAA social media contributor, Jason Karn is well versed in the intricacies of implementation and updates as they happen. As Chief Compliance Officer for Total HIPAA, Jason takes a hands-on approach to assisting clients with the details of developing a well-documented HIPAA compliance plan.
Future Webinars To Follow
Come back next week to read about the webinars to follow.
MACRA and HIPAA
The Medicare Access & Chip Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) ended the former payment program for Medicare and begins a push toward the Quality Payment Program. This Program was created to improve Medicare by helping organizations focus on care quality and making patients healthier. In order to entice physicians to participate in this program, the Quality Payment Program has two tracks:
- Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs), or
- Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS)1
We are going to focus on MIPS here since this is most applicable to the small- and medium-sized practices we serve. If you participate in MIPS, you are going to need to submit data collected from the following activities:
- Quality- 60% of your score;
- Improvement Activities- 15% of your score;
- Advancing Care Information- 25% of your score; and
- Cost- No data submission required. Calculated from claims1
For the purposes of HIPAA, we are going to focus on Advancing Care Information (ACI). HIPAA is a key component of this program. As you see, ACI makes up 25% of your total score for MIPS, and HIPAA is required in order to qualify for a score. So, if you don’t have HIPAA in place, you will not qualify for a score for ACI, and you will lose a full quarter of your MIPS score before you even get started.
