PODCAST: Consultant Rita Numerof Affirms Position that “MIPS Isn’t the Solution”
Last year, soon after the first reporting period began for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015’s (MACRA’s) Quality Payment Program (QPP), one prominent healthcare consultant, Rita Numerof, Ph.D., attested that QPP reporting measures don’t create an even playing field for participating clinicians. At the time, she specifically took issue with “the validity and accuracy of MIPS [the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System] reporting, and the amount of bureaucracy associated with it.”
Numerof, the co-founder and president of St. Louis-based consulting firm Numerof & Associates, recently was a guest on the Healthcare Informatics podcast, and reiterated her concerns with MACRA/MIPS, noting that there are “fundamental issues in the design and the philosophy behind the program.”
She says, “I’m concerned when we look to Washington, [D.C.] or state governments for defining what should drive quality. I think it’s a statement that the industry has failed itself, and failed us as consumers and patients, if we’re looking to Washington to determine what the quality measures should be and to Washington to look at reporting relative to cost. In most other businesses, business leaders define what the product set that they want to offer to their stakeholders should be.”
Also on the podcast, Numerof and Healthcare Informatics Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal discuss what she’s seeing in terms of healthcare organizations’ readiness for value-based care, the recent Congressional bill that proposed a slowdown of MIPS, and much more health IT policy.
Numerof has more than 25 years of experience helping executives understand the implications of an evolving healthcare market, and has consulted with everyone from leading academic and community hospital systems, payers, and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical, device and diagnostics companies.
Healthcare payment reform has been a key focus for Numerof and she’s written the policy guidance on ACOs (accountable care organizations) for The Heritage Foundation and other policy organizations. Last year she also published her book which lays out a plan for healthcare reform titled, “Bringing Value to Healthcare: Practical Steps for Getting to a Market-Based Model.”
The podcast with Numerof runs about 20 minutes in length and keep in mind, you can listen to all Healthcare Informatics podcasts right here.
