Are you ready for MACRA?
If you’re a health leader in the U.S., preparing for the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) payment reform law is likely top of mind. With the compliance period already underway as of January 1 and the first reporting requirements in effect at the end of 2017, you want to have the right technology in place to help you comply with MACRA. And because the legislation is quite complex and the compliance requirements will get more intense over the next couple years, you need solutions that can help you keep pace.
MACRA aims to transition health organizations from fee-for-service to value-based care. Together with our partners, we offer solutions that can help your health organization do that by engaging your patients to get—and stay—healthy, empowering your care teams to improve care team productivity, optimizing your clinical and operational effectiveness to drive better diagnoses and treatment, and transforming the care continuum through platforms that provide insight.
We’re working with industry standards groups and our partners to make sure our customers have a platform that readies them for MACRA as it unfolds and empowers them to provide value-focused care to further the triple aim as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): better care for individuals, better health for populations, and lower cost.
For example, one of the key objectives of MACRA is health IT interoperability—so health organizations can more easily and securely exchange health information across the care continuum.
Toward that end, we’re investing heavily to ensure our technologies comply with industry standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a standard for exchanging electronic health information from Health Level Seven International (HL7).
We’ve implemented the FHIR specification for a common application programming interface (API) in many of our platforms such as our Microsoft Azure cloud services. For a technical example of the use of a FHIR API in Azure to enable information sharing, check out this article.
Taking advantage of solutions that make it easier for data to be exchanged between different systems and devices can not only help you comply with MACRA and improve care coordination across the health ecosystem, it can also empower your health organization to innovate. You can more easily aggregate intelligence for better insight and you can connect a whole new generation of devices to enable remote monitoring and new care models.
You can use solutions for care coordination and patient engagement such as FollowMyHealth from our partner Allscripts. In addition today, they have announced the availability of the dbMotion Solution, an interoperability platform to help you achieve the interoperability and value-based objectives of MACRA.
“Providers need a platform that enables them to meaningfully integrate and act on their patients’ health information,” said Allscripts Senior Vice President and General Manager of Population Health, Martha Thorne. “By offering access to dbMotion features through the cloud, it will help lower the barrier to entry for health systems looking for genuine interoperability and empower them to make more informed decisions for safer, more efficient care.”
In the coming months, we’ll share more ways you can meet the imperatives of MACRA with eHealth solutions from Microsoft and our partners so stay tuned. And please let us know if you have any questions or comments via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
