nurse practitioners, and other health care professionals. Total PQRS incentive payments for 2012 decreased by 35 percent com- pared with 2011 payments, and aver- age individual and group practice bonus payments dropped to $457 and $5,736, respectively, as the incentive amount dropped from 1 percent in 2011 to 0.5 percent in 2012. Still, the number of eligible professionals who qualified for a pay boost increased 38 percent from 2011, and the number of group practic- es that received an incentive in the 2012 program increased 10 percent compared with the previous year. In the eRx program, 227,447 eligible
professionals representing 55,015 phy- sician group practices earned $335.3 million in incentive payments in 2012, an 18-percent increase over 2011. The number of practices that qualified for a 2012 incentive increased 28 percent compared with 2011, and the average payments were $1,474 per individual and $6,095 per practice.
About 60,000 eligible health pro- fessionals received an eRx penalty in 2013 because they were not successful e-prescribers in 2011, did not meet the reporting requirements in the first half of 2012, or did not qualify for an exemp- tion or exclusion.
Still, that number represents a sig- nificant drop from the 135,931 who received an eRx penalty in 2012. More than 75 percent of those penalized in 2013 did not participate in the eRx in- centive program at all. For more information about these and other Medicare quality reporting programs, visit the Practice Help section of TMA’s website,
www.texmed.org/ PracticeHelp. n
Amy Lynn Sorrel is associate editor of Texas Medicine. You can reach her by telephone at (800) 880-1300, ext. 1392, or (512) 370-1392; by fax at (512) 370-1629; or by email at
amy.sorrel@
texmed.org.
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June 2014 TEXAS MEDICINE 53
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