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Practice Fusion · Feb 18, 2015

PQRS attestation and Meaningful Use deadline extended

CMS recently extended the attestation deadline for Meaningful Use and Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) for the 2014 reporting year to March 20, 2015*. If you bill Medicare or Medicaid, it’s crucial for you to attest before the deadline to earn incentives and avoid penalties.

Attestation is the process of reporting your values to CMS after completing a reporting period, similar to filing your taxes. If you completed the program requirements for any reporting period in 2014, you must attest before the March 20, 2015 deadline to avoid penalties and earn incentives. Let’s review what you need to attest for both programs:

Attesting for Meaningful Use

Attestation involves reporting your core, menu, and Clinical Quality Measures to CMS online, either through the CMS attestation portal or your state’s Medicaid program website. In order to attest successfully and prepare for potential future audits, you’ll need to gather documentation prior to attesting and maintain the documentation for six years after you attest. Practice Fusion created an attestation center complete with resources to assist you with Meaningful Use attestation.

The submission deadline to attest for the 2014 reporting year is 11:59pm ET on March 20.
Learn more about attesting for Meaningful Use»

Attesting for PQRS

PQRS is another program run by CMS that incentivizes or penalizes eligible providers based on the reporting of Clinical Quality Measures. There are several reporting options for submitting Clinical Quality Measures to CMS to meet PQRS requirements, and each reporting option has a different reporting deadline.

Practice Fusion supports the EHR Reporting Option for the 2014 reporting year, which has a submission deadline of 8pm ET on March 20, 2015.

To meet EHR Reporting requirements for the 2014 reporting year, you must utilize your EHR to report nine Clinical Quality Measures with patients in the denominator (meaning you have seen a patient that meets the denominator criteria for that measure).

Your nine selected measure must cover three National Quality Strategy domains, with at least one Medicare patient in one of the CQM denominators (meaning at least one of your selected measures is applicable to a Medicare patient).

All participating providers, as well as a non-submitting administrator, must register for an Individuals Authorized Access to CMS Computer Services (IACS) account. To create an account:

  • Visit the IACS account registration page.
  • Scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Physician Quality Reporting System/eRx”, accept the terms, and validate your email.
  • The non-submitting administrator will need to register as a Security Official.
  • Any participating providers will need to register for a PQRS Submitter Role.

*This deadline was extended from February 28, 2014 to March 20, 2014.