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Patient Reminders-

MU, CQR, PQRS, etc.

Last Post by Anonymous 1 second ago

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Anonymous

(@Anonymous)

Posts: 0

New Member Guest

Topic starter

This may seem like a silly question, but one of our coders believes that the (capitalized OR) in the statement for the patient reminder, " More than 20% of all patient 65 years or older OR 5 years or younger were sent an appropriate..." really means AND, and not or. So, is it AND or is it truly OR?

We have created Hypertension Reminder Letters to meet this, but every time I run the report, we aren't meeting the 20%. When I do the actual math myself, we should be hitting 50%. Thoughts??? Help!

Posted : October 11, 2013 1:41 am

joeg1962

(@joeg1962)

Posts: 843

Noble Member

The correct logic should be OR

As in:

({@PtAge}>=65 or {@PtAge}<=5) and
{PERSON.SEARCHNAME} <= "AZZ"

Which tells my the people whose last name begins with A and are

(>=65 OR <=5).

Thought of another way, you can be older than 65 OR younger than 5, but no one can be older than 65 AND younger than 5.

If you are getting weird results in logic, beware of parenthesis, as may be needed to properly address and nest the logic.

Posted : October 11, 2013 5:32 am

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Don't forget to take into consideration the "seen within the last 3 years prior to the start of the reporting period" bit. I've seen it catch a few people off guard when they were reviewing their numbers.

Posted : October 30, 2013 6:27 am

ljburnham

(@ljburnham)

Posts: 331

Reputable Member

We are looking at sending reminder letters for patients that need their Flu Shots, unfortunately with the limited options GE gives us in the inquiries I am finding identifying these patients a tedious process. How are others creating inquires for letters? Any feed back would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Laurie

Posted : August 10, 2014 11:53 pm

Anonymous

(@Anonymous)

Posts: 0

New Member Guest

We are wondering how others are interpreting the patient reminder measure. It states that we must send the reminders per patient preference but then under "Additional Information", it states '...only when it is known by the provider'.

Are you asking patients for their preferred method or managing it when/if the patient tells staff/providers that they want to be notified a different way?

We currently send reminders to get labs prior to their appointment via phone and by letter.

Thanks

Constance

[email protected]

Posted : August 13, 2014 7:20 am

Anonymous

(@Anonymous)

Posts: 0

New Member Guest

We are currently running CPS12 in test mode, due to go live on Sept. 12th. We are running through all of the MU measures to make sure everything is covered. We wanted to see if any of group had any good templates for patient reminders that they would be willing to share?

Thanks,

Don Ritchie

Dir. of Clinical and Business Informatics

Park West Health System, Inc.

FQHC

Baltimore, MD

Posted : August 13, 2014 10:56 am

Tessa

(@tessa)

Posts: 52

Trusted Member

I'd love to know how specialty practices are meeting this measure.

We are a large pain management practice, and have bent over backward in terms of workflow to meet MU Stage 1. (The only way I could get my docs to document info on diabetes and hypertension is to threaten them with the chlamydia measures.) But this patient reminder measure is keeping me up at night. We literally don't do a single thing that could be considered preventive in our practice.

In order to meet the (limited number of) quality measures currently offered by GE, we're going to collect data on influenza/pneumonia vaccines, and recommend that our patients get the vaccines, but we won't be administering the vaccines. We do drug screening in our office, but much of that is random, and if I sent the patients letters telling them they'd have to have one at their as of now unscheduled appointments, most of them would take that as a clue that they shouldn't schedule the next one.

My other question is - under which provider does this measure count the patients? The responsible provider in the registration? We have quite a few NPs who attest to Medicaid, and all the patients have the physicians as their responsible provider.

Any suggestions?

Posted : August 14, 2014 9:20 am

mikeseale

(@mikeseale)

Posts: 344

Reputable Member

Tessa said:

My other question is - under which provider does this measure count the patients? The responsible provider in the registration? We have quite a few NPs who attest to Medicaid, and all the patients have the physicians as their responsible provider.

It's the responsible provider for the document.

Posted : August 14, 2014 11:17 pm

Monsterglue

(@monsterglue)

Posts: 37

Trusted Member

I am also having trouble with this measure. I work with 2 Gastroenterology practices, and there are very limited options in the inquiries for colon and EGD recalls. Any other Gi practices out there tying to pull inquiries for colon and EGD recalls? I would love to know how your doing it.

Posted : August 19, 2014 12:35 am

vwick

(@vwick)

Posts: 34

Trusted Member

Today I'm working with this measure in hopes of getting ready for an October reporting period for Stage II. The measure does not take into account specialists that don't practice the same way as a Primary Care Clinic and don't have a traditional reminder situation.

We're a multi-specialty clinic & we have 3 GI groups. One of our 3 was already using orders as a way to communicate to the staff to enter a recall in the PM side of CPS, then completing the order. It gave a check/balance system for recalls since it's not an automated entry. We're testing for measure 12 not completing the recall order and forwarding it to the due date. It would help with bulk printing of letters instead of having to print a report from the PM and then print a letter out of the chart, if they meet the 2 visit requirement. I'm not sure this will help us now with our Oct - Dec reporting goal. The struggle we are having with GI, seeing a patient twice in two years can be a huge challenge, especially if you're just doing a colonoscopy & then we don't need to see them again for 5 years. It's just not clinically appropriate based on the findings. We have a couple other divisions, like the pain clinic discussed above that just don't have a clinical need to remind patients due to the type of specialty it is.

I'm testing today a few different ways to print the letters, but our limitation is not having the CQR reports to verify what we are doing is working. We've built some reports we're testing with, assuming we know what is being pulled, but until we have CQR working, it's hard to know if our testing will be valid.

Posted : September 3, 2014 1:56 am

Monsterglue

(@monsterglue)

Posts: 37

Trusted Member

OMG! I would love to pick your brain more about this! We just learned that we can probably use CPS 10 (our current version) for this reporting period. So that's a little bit of a relief. But we'll have to go to CPS 12 Jan 1, so ive been racking my brain on how to do this.

CMS is definily F-ing with us on this measure. We've always put our recalls into the PM side of Centricity, and until I read that we would have to change the way to input them, ive been lost. We don't "attach" a obs term to them as they are inputted, I wouldn't even know how to do that.

I can understand that it's super complicated to test without CQR. I hope GE gets on top of stuff soon.

Adrienne Hannan

The Gastroenterology Group

[email protected]

Posted : September 3, 2014 2:09 am

ljburnham

(@ljburnham)

Posts: 331

Reputable Member

vwick said:

We're a multi-specialty clinic & we have 3 GI groups. One of our 3 was already using orders as a way to communicate to the staff to enter a recall in the PM side of CPS, then completing the order. It gave a check/balance system for recalls since it's not an automated entry. We're testing for measure 12 not completing the recall order and forwarding it to the due date. It would help with bulk printing of letters instead of having to print a report from the PM and then print a letter out of the chart, if they meet the 2 visit requirement.

What are you using for a recall? I was told that it couldn't be for an appointment reminder....

Posted : September 9, 2014 4:21 am

vwick

(@vwick)

Posts: 34

Trusted Member

This is part of the CMS language:

"To count for the measure, reminders for preventive/follow-up care must be for care that the patient is not already scheduled to receive. Reminders for referrals or to engage in certain activities are also included in this objective and measure."

What we took from the CMS information is that any follow-up care, as long as it wasn't already scheduled & meet the other requirements of the measure would be included within the patient recall measure.

We tried to run our patient report by recalls & the option is not available in the drop down that allows you to run the actionable letters. I have a ticket open with GE to get some more clarification on this inquiry/actionable letters area.

Thank you,

Vicky

The Oregon Clinic

Posted : September 9, 2014 5:58 am

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