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The 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) will sunset three current Medicare performance measurement and incentive payment programs in 2018. (This year, 2016, will be the last year these programs will be measuring and rewarding Medicare physician performance.) These are: the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS); the HIT Meaningful Use (MU) program; and, the Value-Based Modifier (VM) Program. The VM Program, modified under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, is designed to incent Medicare physician performance by updating annual Part B physician payments based on their quality and cost (or spending) performance. (The performance and payment years are two years apart, e.g., the 2016 payment year is based on 2014 performance.)

During this 23 minute conversation Ms. Cleary explains how the VM program is designed, how physicians have performed to date under the program, the extent to which physicians use VM data to inform or improve their practice, how the program will be translated, or continue, under the MACRA Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and quality and value performance expectations under MIPS beginning in 2017, the first MACRA performance year.

Ms. Kelly Cleary is a DC-based health care attorney with the firm Akin Gump. Her work primarily concerns health care related legislative and regulatory initiatives, matters involving state and federal fraud and abuse laws and cybersecurity, privacy and data protection issues. Prior to joining Akin Gump, Ms. Clearly clerked for the Honorable Claude M. Hilton in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. She was graduated from Catholic University's School of Law. While there she served as editor-in-chief of the Catholic University Law Review.

For more on the CMS VM program go to: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-payment/physicianfeedbackprogram/valuebasedpaymentmodifier.html

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