The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a tool to share automatically electronic data for the Medicare Quality Payment Program. This new release is the first in a series that will be part of CMS’s ongoing efforts to spur the creation of innovative, customizable tools to reduce burden for clinicians, while also supporting high-quality care for patients.
In October, CMS released the Quality Payment Program website, an interactive site to help clinicians understand the program and successfully participate. This release, commonly referred to as an Application Program Interface (API), builds on that site by making it easier for other organizations to retrieve and maintain the Quality Payment Program’s measures and enable them to build applications for clinicians and their practices. The API, available on the Quality Payment Program website, will allow developers to write software using the information described on the Explore Measures section of the site. Based on interviews with clinicians, CMS created the Explores Measures tool, which enables clinicians and practice managers to select measures that likely fit their practice, assemble them into a group and print or save them for reference. Already, tens of thousands of people are using this tool.
Dr. Kate Goodrich, Director of the CMS Centers for Clinical Standards and Quality said, “The API will continue CMS’s focus on user-driven design by providing developers and our partners the opportunity to turn our data into powerful applications. CMS is committed to collaborating with the organizations that doctors trust to make their lives easier, while supporting their efforts to improve the quality of care across America.”
“An important part of the Quality Payment Program is to make it easier and less expensive to participate, so clinicians may focus on seeing patients,” said Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS. “This first release is a step in that process, both for physicians and the technologists who support them.”
Through streamlined policy and improved technology and operations, the Quality Payment Program is modernizing Medicare to pay smarter for better care. The Quality Payment Program is designed to reduce reporting burden on clinicians so that they can focus on their patients, while also providing useful information to clinicians and other stakeholders, so that overall care quality improves. As the program and its supporting website mature, CMS will continue to release data and APIs to spur innovation and keep participants up-to-date.