Advocacy Alert: Urge CMS to Include IROMS Functional Measures to MSK-Focused MIPS Value Pathway

CMS recently announced they plan to support a musculoskeletal (MSK)-focused MIPS Value Pathway (MVP) for the 2024 MIPS performance year—great news for the rehab community and therapists participating in the MIPS program. Unfortunately, there’s one big catch—IROMS functional measures are missing.

What are MVPs?

First, a little background is in order. As mentioned in the 2023 Final Rule, CMS plans to sunset the traditional MIPS program and utilize MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) to improve the ease and efficiency of reporting metrics for value-based care. Presently, CMS is using MVPs for performance year 2023, but there’s currently no MVPs specific to rehab therapy.

What’s going on with the new proposed MVP?

Thanks to the advocacy efforts of WebPT Members, industry leaders, and others in the rehab therapy community—including submissions from both Keet Health and the APTA—CMS created an MSK-focused MVP for the 2024 MIPS performance year. Unfortunately, CMS only included the IROMS pain quality measure in this MVP, and has left out the IROMS functional measures in favor of other measures. Given their widespread use, omitting IROMS functional measures will create significant barriers and undue hardships on providers looking to serve their patients with the best tools available.

How can you act?

There’s still time to convince CMS that more inclusive functional measures like IROMS should be included in the forthcoming MVP—but for that to happen, we need to make our voices heard.  That is why we’re encouraging every clinician and every professional utilizing IROMS for MIPS to submit their feedback during the comment period. 

To make it easy, we’ve created a letter template (with instructions) that you can send to the MIPS MVP Feedback program by no later than February 8, 2023—as this is when the comment period will close. You can download the customizable letter template here.

As Susan Lofton, MPT, VP of Outcomes and Clinical Transformation at WebPT states, “This effort is critical to ensure clinicians can use the legacy measures that are part of their daily clinical practice into the future for reimbursement in value-based care initiatives.” As such, we hope that you’ll help ensure the viability of this new MVP and the success of providers within the program.