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On January 21, 2021 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officially released a proposed rule to revise the HIPAA Privacy Rule. While none of these changes can be finalized until after the public comment period has ended and HHS has reviewed the comments and written a final rule, the proposed changes are staggering.

This blog post will present a high-level summary as Part 1 of our multi-part series breaking down the proposed changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rule.

On February 25, 2021, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that they are making the following important changes to the 2020 MIPS extreme and uncontrollable circumstances (EUC) hardships:

• Extending the deadline for MIPS COVID-19 EUC applications to March 31, 2021.
• Applying the MIPS automatic EUC policy to all individual MIPS eligible clinicians
  • For more details on what this means, read the “Important Notes” section of this blog.

2021 is now here and, with it, comes changes to how physicians must document for and code patient office and outpatient visits. For the first time since the implementation of office/outpatient visit E/M CPT code set in 1992, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has instituted extensive changes to the coding criteria.

Have you had difficulties finding a referring provider's direct address? You are not alone! The NPPES system now supports updating your providers' NPI registration with their direct address. This will contribute to a national directory that should improve the use of direct messaging. While there is no requirement in MIPS to update your registration at the time of publication, CMS will post a list of providers without direct messaging capabilities in the second half of this year. 

Telehealth (or telemedicine) is highly regulated, and as a result, has been difficult to fully adopt. Over the past week, CMS has made changes to broaden access to telehealth services. 

Implementing Medicare Telehealth visits allows providers to get reimbursed at the same rate as an E/M visit.

Using a combination of the 2020 Final Rule and the 2020 Measure Benchmarks released on 12/31, we have compiled a list of the most important measure changes for this year. This doesn't cover all possible measures for an Ophthalmologist to report on, but these are the ones that are most specific that a majority of our clients will use.

While there are many measures under review, the one that effects a majority of our clients is the Total Cost per Capita measure (TPCC). Our thoughts after reviewing these reports is that if these changes are implemented, specialists will continue to get attributed in the TPCC measure. Here are some notes on what we have found so far:

Follow these steps to create an EIDM account. This will give you access to portal.cms.gov for feedback for 2016 and prior, and qpp.cms.gov for feedback for 2017 and beyond.

NOTICE: This was developed based on documentation from the AMA, and HHS websites. This is not legal advice.

The purpose of this guide is to provide you a high-level overview of the HIPAA requirements of MIPS, and an attempt to simplify a very complex concept. MIPS