On May 6, CMS suspended eight improvement activities within its 2025 rubric for determining merit pay for Medicare providers, the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS.
The agency plans to fully remove these improvement activities in future rulemaking:
- MIPS-eligible clinician leadership in clinical trials or community-based participatory research
- Create and implement an anti-racism plan
- Implement food insecurity and nutrition risk identification and treatment protocols
- Create and implement a plan to improve care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer patients
- Practice improvements that engage community resources to address drivers of health
- Use of toolsets or other resources to close healthcare disparities across communities
- COVID-19 clinical data reporting with or without clinical trial
- Vaccine achievement for practice staff: COVID-19, influenza, and hepatitis B
Clinicians working on these improvement activities will be able to attest to completing them and receive credit, but CMS encouraged clinicians to choose other MIPS improvement activities.
The directive comes amid upheaval in the U.S. healthcare industry as federal health agencies lay off thousands of workers and universities and state health departments face frozen funds and stop-work orders on dozens of research projects.
