Jan. 17, 2020 – Charlotte, NC – HiQ Services, LLC is pleased to announce that Jim Riggi, founder and former CEO of Medflow, Inc. has joined HiQ as Executive Director of Eyecare Accounts. HiQ was founded in 2019 to help small and large practices succeed with MIPS, MACRA & QPP across a wide range of medical specialties. HiQ’s President, Mike Schmidt (formerly the Vice President of Client Success & Regulatory Affairs at Eye Care Leaders) commented: “HiQ is honored to have such a recognized industry leader as Jim Riggi focusing on the important medical specialties of Ophthalmology & Optometry. We

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CMS has published extensive documentation on the changes to the Quality Payment Program and its MIPS track for the 2020 performance year (see references) and numerous industry reporters and pundits have already mirrored this information; the purpose of this short document is simply to provide a concise checklist of annual changes along with some recommendations for high-priority actionable items. 2020 Performance Category Weighting Performance Category Standard No Cost Score EHR Hardship Exclusion (small practices only) No Cost Score + EHR Hardship Exclusion Quality 45% 55% 70% 85% Cost 15% 0% 15% 0% Promoting Interoperability 25% 30% 0% 0% Improvement Activities

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Improvement Activities (IAs) are perhaps the most misunderstood MIPS performance category. IAs are not measures (notice that word “Activities”) and they are not a state of being (notice that word “Improvement”); they require active participation by MIPS eligible clinicians (going up from 1 per group in 2019 to 50% of the group’s MIPS eligible clinicians for 2020); perhaps most critically they require documentation which is not submitted each year but which is subject to audits. All too often, practices allow their QCDR or QR registry to submit MIPS IAs on their behalf without so much as having any documentation of

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Continuous Quality Improvement (CGI) is a conceptual framework for driving practice improvement activities, such as are mandated for MIPS Improvement Activities. CMS really fails to provide much guidance for this part of the MIPS program, but it may be helpful to take a systematic, structured approach both to maximize the actual benefit of performing Improvement Activities as well as to minimize the risk of MIPS audits revealing that little improvement and/or little activity was actually performed. Continuous Quality Improvement Explained There are a number of well-written summaries of CGI: “Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is the systematic process of identifying, describing,

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