2 Major Problems with MACRA

Everyone’s started to dive into the 10 million page MACRA (that might be an exaggeration, but it feels about that long) and over the next months we’ll be sure to talk about the details a lot more. However, I know that many healthcare organizations are tired of going through incredibly lengthy regulations before they’re final. Makes sense that people don’t want to go through all the details just for them to change.

As I look at MACRA from a very high level, I see at least two major problems with how MACRA will impact healthcare.

Loss of EHR Innovation
First, much like meaningful use and EHR certification, MACRA is going to suck the life out of EHR development teams. For 2-3 years, EHR roadmaps have been nothing but basically conforming to meaningful use and EHR certification. Throw in ICD-10 development for good measure and EHR development teams have basically had to be coding their application to a government standard instead of customer requests and unique innovations.

Just today I heard the Founder of SOAPware, Randall Oates, MD, say “I’m grieving MACRA to a great degree.” He’s grieving because he knows that for many months his company won’t be able to focus on innovation, but will instead focus on meeting government requirements. In fact, he said as much when he said, “We don’t have the liberty to be innovative and creative.” And no, meeting government regulations in an innovative way doesn’t meet that desire.

I remember going to lunch with a very small EHR vendor a year or so ago. I first met him pre-meaningful use and he loved being able to develop a unique EHR platform that made a doctor more efficient. He kept his customer base small so that he could focus on the needs of a small group of doctors. Fast forward to our lunch a year or so ago. He’d chosen to become a certified EHR and make it so his customers could attest to meaningful use. Meaningful use made it so he hated his EHR development process and he had lost all the fire he’d had to really create something beautiful for doctors.

The MACRA requirements will continue to suck the innovation out of EHR vendors.

New Layers of Work With No Relief
When you look at MACRA, we have all of these new regulations and requirements, but don’t see any real relief from the old models. It’s great to speak hypothetically about the move to value based reimbursement, but we’re only dipping our toe in those waters and so we can’t replace all of the old reimbursement requirements. In some ways it makes sense why CMS would take a cautious approach to entering the value based world. However, MACRA does very little to reduce the burden on the backs of physicians and healthcare organizations. In fact, in many ways it adds to their reporting burden.

Yes, there was some relief offered when it comes to meaningful use moving from the all or nothing approach and a small reduction in the number of measures. However, when it comes to value based reimbursement, MACRA seems to just be adding more reporting burdens on doctors without removing any of the old fashioned fee for service requirements.

MACRA is not like ICD-10. Once ICD-10 was implemented you could see how ICD-9 and the skills required for that coding set will eventually be fully replaced and you won’t need that skill or capability anymore. The same doesn’t seem to be true with value based care. There’s no sign that value based care will be a full replacement of anything. Instead, it just adds another layer of complexity, regulation, and reporting to an already highly regulated healthcare economic system.

This is why it’s no surprise that many are saying that MACRA will be the end of small practices. At scale, they’re onerous. Without scale, these regulations can be the death of a practice. It’s not like you can stop doing something else and learn the new MACRA regulations. No, MACRA is mostly additive without removing a healthcare organization’s previous burdens. Watch for more practices to leave Medicare. Although, even that may not be a long term solution since most commercial payers seem to follow Medicare’s lead.

While I think that CMS and the people that work there have their hearts in the right place, these two problems have me really afraid for what’s to come in health IT. EHR vendors the past few months were finally feeling some freedom to listen to their customers and develop something new and unique. I was excited to see how EHR vendors would make their software more efficient and provide better care. MACRA will likely hijack those efforts.

On the other side of the fence, doctors are getting more and more burnt out. These new MACRA regulations just add one more burden to their backs without removing any of the ones that bothered them before. Both of these problems don’t paint a pretty picture for the future of healthcare.

The great part is that MACRA is currently just a proposed rule. CMS has the opportunity to fix these problems. However, it will require them to take a big picture look at the regulation as opposed to just looking at the impact of an individual piece. If they’re willing to focus MACRA on the big wins and cut out the parts with questionable or limited benefits, then we could get somewhere. I’m just not sure if Andy Slavitt and company are ready to say “Scalpel!” and start cutting.