Submit Comments on CMS Proposed Rule Aligning EHR and the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program

On April 26, CMS issued the Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM)  that includes revisions to the measures for the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program.

To reduce providers' reporting burden, the proposed rule CMS begins to align several Medicare EHR Incentive Program policies with the Hospital IQR Program's policies. Proposed policies include:

• For the Medicare EHR Incentive Program, beginning the submission period for electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) earlier, on January 2, 2014, which will:
  • Allow eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals that would like to submit aggregate data for meaningful use the option of attesting
  • Streamline the submission of aggregate population data in order to invoke the case number threshold exemption for an eCQM

• Giving hospitals that are participating in the Hospital IQR Program the option to electronically submit one quarter's data for 16 quality measures from four measure sets  

• Collecting and reporting quality measure data through certified EHR technology (CEHRT)

CMS believes the use of CEHRT will greatly simplify and streamline reporting for many hospital quality-reporting programs. We also anticipate that through electronic reporting, hospitals will be able to leverage EHRs for Hospital IQR Program quality data that is now manually abstracted from charts.

If hospitals choose to electronically report these four measure sets, this will satisfy the reporting requirement for both the CQM component of the Medicare EHR Incentive Program and the requirement to report these measure sets under the Hospital IQR Program.

Review our fact sheet for more information about the major quality-related provisions of the proposed rule. 

Submit Your Comments
CMS will accept comments on the proposed rule until June 25, 2013, and will respond to comments in a final rule to be issued by August 1, 2013.