This post is part of the MACRA Monday series of blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.
It’s May 2017 and I’m already burnt out of MACRA. Does anyone else feel this way? The MACRA program has just gotten started and I’m already pretty sick and tired of talking about the details. I can only imagine how a doctor feels at this point. It feels a little bit like groundhog day doesn’t it?
I’m sure much of what contributes to this is the layers and layers of government requirements that we’ve had to go through over the past 5-6 years. It started with meaningful use and PQRS and then we realized there were multiple stages of meaningful use. We’ve been through stage 1 and stage 2. Of course, related to that is all the EHR certification regulation. Then, ICD-10 hit us upside the head. We worked through it, but it wasn’t fun and didn’t add much value to our patients or our organizations. Now we’re hit by MACRA. Aren’t we all just a little tired of these regulations?
Don’t get me wrong. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, so this is the norm. Plus, I’m not saying that practices should just shun MACRA. Most practices I know need to at least avoid the penalties. So, they’ll have to participate, but I don’t know a single doctor that’s excited about the benefits of any piece of the MACRA legislation. That should tell us something and we should listen.
Think about what an achievement that is by MACRA. Doctors aren’t excited about any of it. It’s actually kind of embarrassing to think about. If you are a doctor that’s excited about some piece of MACRA and especially MIPS, I’d love to hear about it. How is any of it going to improve care, lower costs, or improve productivity? I’ll be waiting in the comments, but I certainly won’t be holding my breathe.
How sad that millions of dollars and millions of hours are going to be wasted on a legislation that isn’t too hard, but also doesn’t add value. That’s a travesty and I don’t see it changing.
I’m trying to think what would reinvigorate organizations. Is there a legislation that doctors would get excited about? That’s a hard thing to crack, but the best I could do is interoperability. What if we scraped all of MACRA and just focused on penalizing organizations that aren’t sharing data with each other.
Even this change would leave a lot of people wondering the exact value. However, there’s a pretty solid case to be made that exchanging healthcare data could improve care and lower costs. Those are things that people can get behind.
All of this said, I’m not expecting any changes. MACRA is here to stay and EHR vendors and healthcare organizations are going to have to grind it out and participate. However, that doesn’t make the MACRA burnout any less poignant.
Be sure to check out all of our MACRA Monday blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.
