>>McMAHON: What's MIPS? MIPS is the Merit-based Incentive Payment System that the government uses to reward physicians for engaging in quality and performance improvement work. For the first time, this system now includes professional development expectations and CME providers have the opportunity to help clinicians in their community maximize their MIPS points and maximize the reimbursement and the incentives that they receive for caring for patients in the governmental systems. How do you do MIPS activities? Well, someone in your organization may already be doing quality improvement work. Your role in that circumstance is to connect CME with the quality improvement work that's already occurring. If there isn't, you have the opportunity to simply and easily meet the needs of your clinicians and your organization by delivering quality improvement activities that are CME.

What's a quality improvement activity that counts? It's very simple. Are you addressing a quality and safety gap? Do you have specific measurable aims for improvement? Is the intervention designed to result in improvement? Is there data collection to support the impact of the interventions? And can you define meaningful participation? These are locally defined measures. So for one clinician, it might be a very different objective than another. It can also be an activity that's done with an individual or a group or a large group, the entire institution if you wish.

MIPS now includes CME. It's a terrific opportunity to bring greater value to the clinicians in the community that you serve, and connect the work that's going on in your institution with this credit and incentive system that rewards physicians for the work we all know is needed for the profession and for the community we serve.