The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has recently announced important submission deadlines for its Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program. All eligible professionals (EPs), including psychiatrists, participating in Medicare must submit relevant quality data by specific deadlines to avoid a downward payment adjustment to their Medicare reimbursement.
The deadline for submission depends on how the EP transmits the data to CMS. The submission timeframes are posted here. Additional information can be found on CMS’s PQRS page.
The Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) is a quality reporting program that encourages individual eligible professionals (EPs) and group practices to report information on the quality of care to Medicare. PQRS gives participating EPs and group practices the opportunity to assess the quality of care they provide to their patients, helping to ensure that patients get the right care at the right time.
By reporting on PQRS quality measures, individual EPs and group practices can also quantify how often they are meeting a particular quality metric. Beginning in 2015, the program will apply a negative payment adjustment to individual EPs and PQRS group practices who did not satisfactorily report data on quality measures for Medicare Part B Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) covered professional services in 2013. Those who report satisfactorily for the 2015 program year will avoid the 2017 PQRS negative payment adjustment.
Note: PQRS was formerly known as the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).