Per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, if you want to participate in the 2014 PQRS program as a group practice, now’s the time to register for the group practice reporting option (GPRO). To do so, access the Physician Value-Physician Quality Reporting System (PV-PQRS) registration system through this portal. You’ll need a valid Individuals Authorized Access to the CMS Computer Services (IACS) user ID and password. The registration deadline is September 30, 2014.
Participating as a Group
GPRO is a registry-based PQRS reporting option geared toward multi-therapist practices (clinics with two or more therapists) that wish to participate as a group. It allows therapists who share one tax ID to report measures and reach the required reporting percentage together. This, in turn, allows all therapists in the group to avoid the 2% payment adjustment, which CMS will assess in 2016, and possibly earn the .5% incentive payment, depending on the degree to which the practice chooses to report. Medicare defines a “group practice” as two or more individual eligible professionals (identified by individual National Provider Identifiers [NPIs]) who have reassigned their billing rights to a single Medicare billing Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN).
To comply with PQRS, group practices with two or more eligible professionals must complete the GPRO reporting requirements via a(n):
- Qualified PQRS registry (like WebPT)
- Electronic Health Record (EHR)
- Direct EHR, using certified EHR technology (CEHRT)
- CEHRT through a data submission vendor
- Web interface (only available for groups with 25 or more eligible professionals)
Groups with 25 or more eligible professionals also can elect to supplement their PQRS reporting mechanisms with the Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CG-CAHPS) survey. CG-CAHPS survey completion is a requirement for groups with 100 or more eligible professionals that have elected to complete PQRS via the web interface. You can find more information about the CAHPS survey on this page.
To learn more about 2014 GPRO registration, check out the CMS website. To learn more about meeting the GPRO reporting requirements, check out this CMS page or this CMS document. If you have questions about registration, contact the QualityNet Help Desk at 1-866-288-8912 or Qnetsupport@hcqis.org. Finally, if you have questions regarding GPRO with WebPT, please post them here as comments or email support@webpt.com.
