MGMA successfully advocates for sunsetting of healthcare ETS

On Dec. 27, 2021, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a statement on the status of its COVID-19 healthcare emergency temporary standard (ETS), confirming that it is withdrawing the ETS with the exception of the recordkeeping portions.

Last August, MGMA urged OSHA to not make this standard permanent, due to it disrupting ongoing efforts of medical groups to balance the needs of patients against the imperative to protect employees. Although OSHA is letting this ETS sunset, it expressed its intentions to revisit the issue of protecting healthcare workers from COVID-19 in the future by issuing another standard. MGMA will urge the Agency to solicit input from stakeholders, such as medical groups, when developing such a standard.

Updated member resources to navigate surprise billing

On Jan. 1, 2022, the No Surprises Act requirements prohibiting certain out-of-network balance billing and new uninsured (or self-pay) good faith estimate price transparency requirements took effect. Throughout 2021, the Biden Administration released several rules implementing these newly effective requirements. The Administration will continue to release additional rules throughout 2022 outlining the remaining patient protections that have not yet been implemented.

The MGMA Government Affairs team has updated member-exclusive resources to help group practices better understand the requirements in place. Check out the most up-to-date resources on the MGMA Surprise Billing landing page.

MIPS 2021 data submission window open

Clinicians can now submit and review data for the 2021 performance year for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). The data submission window closes on March 31, 2022 at 8 p.m. (ET). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provided several flexibilities for clinicians due to the COVID-19 public health emergency, including applying an automatic reweighting of performance scores for individual clinicians.

In other MIPS updates: on Jan 1. 2022, the 2022 payment adjustment, based on clinician 2020 MIPS performance scores took effect and will be applied to Part B covered services. Additionally, looking ahead to the 2022 performance year, clinicians can now review their preliminary MIPS eligibility by signing into the Quality Payment Program website