CMS Qualifies 10 CECity QCDR Quality Improvement Registry Collaboratives for PQRS

PITTSBURGH, June 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- CECity, healthcare's leading provider of cloud-based registry platforms for performance improvement, value-based payment and professionalism, today announced that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has recognized ten (10) of CECity's qualified clinical data registry (QCDR) collaboratives for reporting under the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) representing over 25% of all approved QCDRs.

New to PQRS in 2014, the CECity powered QCDRs offer eligible providers across primary and specialty ambulatory care the opportunity to advance beyond annual PQRS reporting to continuous performance measurement, benchmarking, population health management (including patient care gap analysis) and practice improvement, while aligning and simplifying reporting for financial and professional incentive programs, including PQRS, Bridges to Excellence® (BTE), Meaningful Use and Maintenance of Certification® (MOC).

"CECity's QCDR collaboratives are reducing the burden on physicians by streamlining reporting to CMS for value-based payment, and to medical specialty boards for MOC, from within the workflow," said Dr. Bernard Rosof, CEO of QHC Advisory Group, Co-Chair of the National Quality Partnership and immediate past Chair of the AMA convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement. "More importantly, through collaborations with trusted medical specialty organizations, CECity is fostering quality improvement in difficult to reach ambulatory practices of various size and specialty, by expanding access to cost-effective registries, education, peer-to-peer networks and other evidence-based resources that physicians need to improve the quality of patient care in their practice."

A key advantage of participating in PQRS through the CECity powered QCDRs is that CMS has permitted the use of not only PQRS approved measures, but also new measures that are not currently within PQRS. This provides the opportunity for CECity partners to develop and deploy new performance measures through the CECity powered QCDRs that the profession believes best represent how quality should be measured based on specialty, practice setting, or other criteria. Eligible providers and their organizations may then use the new measures by participating in the QCDR to compare their performance to their peers, and benchmark their performance against measures that matter to their practice, for purposes of quality improvement, value-based payment and public reporting.

"Shared risk contracts and value-based purchasing, including bonuses, penalties, public reporting and value-based payment modifiers are now the reality," said Simone Karp, RPh, Chief Business Officer and CECity co-founder. "Our QCDR collaboratives offer providers and their organizations the opportunity to excel in this new era of healthcare reform by transforming the focus from measurement to improvement, and through the use of proper measures that can help them tell their quality care delivery story to payors, peers and most importantly to their patients."

The following are the recognized CECity QCDR collaboratives as posted by CMS. Click here for details.

CECity is actively partnering with EHRs, HIEs and other clinical and financial data sources to create direct data pipelines to the QCDRs through CECity's registry integration hub (ImpaQt Health Gateway®). Please contact CECity if your organization is interested in becoming a CECity data partner.

CECity will continue to offer its current lineup of PQRS reporting solutions, including its popular Turbo-Tax®-like PQRSwizard® (Note: Turbo-Tax® is a registered trademark of Intuit, Inc.).

About CECity®
CECity is the health care industry's leading cloud-based provider of social enterprise platforms and registry-based services that address the "3 Ps" driven by healthcare reform: Pay for Value Reporting, Performance Improvement, and Professional Certification. CECity combines its unique registry and Big Data analytics platform with education and improvement interventions from world-class partners, to help all stakeholders answer the most important question, "How Do We Improve?" Leading organizations across healthcare, including physician practices, ACOs, health systems, health plans, pharmacies, certifying boards, professional societies and academic medical centers, count on CECity to power and scale their high stake solutions as part of a global learning health system model for practice-based safety and quality improvement, performance benchmarking (provider, organization and community level), population health management, patient registries for quality improvement and "real-world" data research, Maintenance of Certification®, medication adherence, care coordination and value-based reporting (Meaningful Use, Bridges to Excellence®, PQRS and more).

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