Moving to the new MACRA/MIPS model has made capturing data paramount for healthcare practices. If your practice relies on manual indexing, you could get left behind. Moving to automated indexing could be the most important step you take to improve your MIPS performance.

Let’s take a look at why.
 
Here’s how MIPS quantifies your performance:
 

• Quality – Quality is replacing PQRS and accounts for 60 percent of your score.
• Improvement Activities – This is a new category, representing 15 percent of your score.
• Advancing Care Information – This is replacing the Medicare EHR Incentive Program (Meaningful Use) and is worth 25 percent of your score.

 
It’s important to note that the more measures you qualify for, the more money you get paid. That means getting more data from your patient’s documentation can increase the measures you report on and the revenue your practice earns.
 
That’s why automation is so important.
 
Think about it.
 
How much time does your nurse or nursing assistant have to enter information into each patient’s chart? If your practice is like most, the answer is “not much”.
 
Realistically, your staff only has time to deal with patients’ current issues – not catch up on the little details.
 
But, that’s a problem. All of those little details provide the data you need for MIPS reporting.
 
This is evident in one of the most important quality reporting measures, closing the referral loop.
 
Closing the Referral Loop
 
Closing the referral loop is about care coordination and involves more than just referring the patient. It also requires following up and receiving a report from the provider the patient was referred to.
 
If your practice is still indexing your documents manually, your process looks something like this:
 

• One person scans the document.
• One person indexes it.
• Another person is responsible for marking changes, updating the flow sheet, connecting it to the external document from the outside provider and closing the order.

 
At any step in that process, an error can occur. Even worse, it’s incredibly time intensive. This means it’s likely that many orders are left open – meaning you aren’t closing the referral loop.
 
Open orders can prevent you from running accurate reports and decrease the efficiency of your practice. When you need to find out if a patient followed through on a referral, your staff has to spend valuable time backtracking instead of focusing on patient care.
 
Automated indexing eliminates those challenges and allows you to close the referral loop. With automated indexing, orders and observations are automatically attached based on document type.
 
When a document is scanned in, the system identifies the document and automatically looks for open orders under the patient file in the specific date range. It can actively tell who has an open order versus an order being open because no one had the time to close it.
 
Improvement Activities
 
Automated indexing even enters the observations you set into your flowsheets. This way, you always have the patient data you need at your fingertips. You can choose which observations to populate, from due dates, future and clinical dates, to pattern observations and static terms (like normal or abnormal for a pap smear).
 
With automated indexing, you always know if your patient has had their diabetic foot exam, pap smear, colonoscopy or mammogram and can access their results without having to comb through their files. This not only allows you to improve patient care but also better quantify your Improvement Activities measures for MIPS.
 
Here are a few ways automated indexing helps capture and quantify data for Improvement Activities and ensure you get paid:
 

• Improving chronic care and preventative care management
• Implementation of documentation improvements for practice/process improvements

 
Advancing Care Information
 
Automated indexing also makes quantifying Advancing Care Information easier.
 
Consider this:
 
When patients log on to the patient portal, they can keep up with their health information. However, it can be difficult for them to sift through all of the data when it’s hidden throughout their chart notes.
 
With automated indexing, all observations are automatically populated into the flowsheet, making them available to patients in an easy-to-read format so they can stay up-to-date and become more involved in their own health.
 
They are more invested in their care and your performance in this measure goes up.
 
Putting It All Together
 
The move to MACRA/MIPS is changing the way your healthcare practice gets paid. If you want to succeed in this new era, you need the ability to capture and quantify more of the data your practice already has available. The best way to do that is through automated indexing.  Moving to automated indexing allows your organization to close the referral loop, better quantify your improvement measures and ensure patients have access to advancing care information.
 
How is your practice handling the transition to MIPS and the new reporting measures that come with it?