eRx, Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) And Its Benefits

Posted by mgsionline on September 19th, 2013

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has come up with several incentive programs like Physician Quality Reporting System, Electronic Health Record (EHR) incentive program and Electronic Prescribing (eRx) incentive program to promote better physician practice management. Eligible Professionals (EP) who serve Medicare patients by participating in such quality initiatives get to enjoy higher reimbursements. They have the liberty to participate in PQRS incentive program while taking part in the eRx incentive program. However, EPs cannot earn incentives under the EHR incentive program and eRx incentive program at the same time. Let’s take a look at the benefits of participating in the eRx and PQRS incentive program:

eRx – An overview: eRx refers to the electronic way of prescribing medicines to patients. Proposed in the year 2009, the eRx incentive program aimed at offering incentives to EPs who produced great results. Initially, they enjoyed a 2% incentive with 0% penalty charges. However in 2012, CMS introduced penalty charges for those EPs who failed to eRx properly.

eRx and PQRS 2013: In the present year (2013), CMS has introduced several changes to eRx and PQRS incentive programs. They are as follows,

• Eligible Healthcare Providers and Facilities will get an incentive payment of 0.5% if they successfully participate in PQRS 2013. The best part is they can enjoy an additional 0.5% incentive by participating in the eRx 2013 program and producing appreciable results.
• In case, Eligible Healthcare Providers and Facilities fail to participate in either of these incentive programs, then will be subject to a penalty of 1.5%. It might impact the provider billing badly. This penalty charge is likely to increase to 2% in the forthcoming years.    

Benefits: By participating and performing extremely well in the eRx program, EPs can be successful in the PQRS program as well. Some benefits are as follows,

• The eRx program allows Eligible Professionals to improve their physician practice management. The administrative complexities involved in handling paper-based prescriptions are controlled to a greater extent with the advent of e-prescribing.
• e-prescribing offers a better clinical decision support to Providers.
• Medication errors that occur frequently in handwritten prescriptions can be avoided by e-prescriptions. Therefore, Eligible Professionals get to enjoy the incentive bonuses while improving their practice.

Implementing the eRx incentive program and more such quality initiatives will require ample time. Healthcare Providers and Facilities simply cannot compromise on their administrative functions including medical billing processes by devoting most of their time in implementing CMS incentive programs. In that scenario, outsourcing a part of provider’s billing functions to a reliable medical billing company can be a prudent choice. Look no further than http://www.mgsionline.com !

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