The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to provide flexibilities to clinicians participating in the Quality Payment Program (QPP) Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clinicians significantly impacted by the public health emergency may submit an "Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances Application" to reweight any or all of the MIPS performance categories for performance year 2020. Clinicians requesting relief will need to provide a justification of the impacts to their practice caused by COVID-19.

CMS has also added a new COVID-19 clinical trials improvement activity under MIPS. Clinicians can obtain MIPS credit in the following two ways:

• A clinician may participate in a COVID-19 clinical trial and have those data entered into a data platform for that study.
• A clinician participating in care of COVID-19 patients may submit clinical COVID-19 patient data to a clinical data registry for purposes of future study.

As a reminder, CMS earlier this year noted that "no data reflecting services provided from Jan. 1 through June 30 will be used in CMS' calculations for the Medicare quality reporting and value-based purchasing programs in order to reduce providers' data collection and reporting burden as they are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Keywords: ACC Publications, Cardiology Magazine, Value-Based Purchasing, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S., COVID-19, Medicare, Public Health, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, Medicaid, Pandemics, Motivation, Data Collection, Emergency Service, Hospital, Registries

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