Dive Brief:
- Niall Brennan, CMS' chief data officer and director of the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA), has announced the approval of a second nationwide Qualified Entity, Amino. As a free service, with the addition of Medicare data, it will help patients make more informed healthcare decisions, such as choosing a provider.
- The Qualified Entity (QE) program, established by the ACA, provides publicly available performance reports and data. There are currently 12 certified QEs, 11 reporting regionally and now two reporting nationally. Two QEs have already released public performance reports.
- The program enables qualified entities to create a more comprehensive picture of provider quality and cost of care by combining Medicare data with data from numerous health plans.
Dive Insight:
According to HIT Consultant, Amino is the "first for-profit company to receive a complete set of national, physician-level claims data from Medicare parts A, B, and D."
A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) will make changes to the QE program, which was enacted under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). "This legislation expands permissible uses and disclosures under the QE program," Brennan wrote in The CMS Blog. "We look forward to receiving comments from interested stakeholders when the NPRM is released."
Timeline of when the NPRM will be published was not mentioned on the blog.
MACRA established the Merit-based Incentive Payment Systems (MIPS), which, as previously reported by Healthcare Dive, eliminated the sustainable growth rate used to determine physician payment.