September 19, 2022 | Net Health

3 Minute Read

How Can Value-Based Care Models, Like MIPS, Help Improve Quality of Care in Rehab Therapy?

When patients seek out or are prescribed rehab therapy, their main goal is to simply get better. They want optimal outcomes, in other words, a standard that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But what is a higher quality of care worth to them?

Without delving into specific dollar amounts, one recent survey found that 57% of American healthcare consumers would be willing to pay more for a higher quality of care.In the same survey, 47% of respondents also said they’d be willing to also pay more for the ability to work with a care team of their choice.2

Quality of care … choice … an outcome-based focus …

This should be music to your ears as well as those of most private practice physical, occupational and speech therapists in the country. Like any other business, after all, private practice rehab therapy businesses must compete in order to survive.

And, in an industry where financial expense so often steals headlines from rates of success, surveys like this serve as a refreshing reminder that in the end, patients simply just want to feel better and lead better lives.

The Emergence of Value-Based Care

As potential patients begin to more keenly focus on quality versus quantity when it comes to the care they receive from healthcare practitioners (including rehab therapists), so too are payers.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), for example, is in the process of transitioning toward value-based payment programs that are designed to incentivize improved quality of care while optimizing costs billed to CMS.

The Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS, is one example of this, impacting Medicare B reimbursement rates for participating providers.

With MIPS, participating rehab clinicians (or groups of clinicians) receive Medicare payment adjustments based on their performance on MIPS quality measures and improvement activities.

All this, of course, requires that participating practitioners track and report (annually) these measures and activities, a process that may deter some providers who have never done this before.

But why should this scare any rehab therapist away?

Remember, we currently live in a healthcare environment where potential patients value quality of care and are willing to pay more for such services – even as MIPS strives to reduce Medicare costs.

This makes the efforts tied into tracking, improving and even promoting outcomes an opportunity for your clinic and your rehab therapy team, not a burden.

Track Outcomes for a Stronger Bottom Line

Not sure how to comply with MIPS tracking and reporting requirements?

Our FOTO® QCDR is a proven solution that has you covered, allowing you and your rehab therapy team to focus on patient care and other clinic operations.

With FOTO® QCDR, providers may select from 20 quality measures, covering nine quality process measures and 11 quality outcome measures, that are highly applicable to therapy care. They may also report improvement activities that reward ongoing efforts for clinical quality improvement and monitoring.

The data collected through this solution can easily be interpreted and used to guide clinical decisions, helping optimize patient outcomes. Where it shows success, the data can also be used to market to potential patients who seek quality of care above all other factors, including cost.

FOTO® QCDR provides intuitive dashboards and expert support, all of which help ensure therapists are fairly reimbursed for the high-quality care they provide. In fact, 100% of all submitters through FOTO® QCDR achieved or exceeded the neutral payment score for MIPS since rehab therapists started participating in MIPS (2019).

 To learn how FOTO® QCDR can benefit your rehab therapy practice, schedule a demo today

FOTO Patient Outcomes MIPS QCDR Dashboard Overview

See the FOTO QCDR Dashboard in Action!

Access Video

REFERENCES:
1 2 Medical Economics, “Americans Are Willing to Pay More for Quality of Care,” Sept. 8, 2022

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