Newswise — PARK RIDGE, IL.— The AANA announced that an agreement with the ABG QCDR that offers AANA members a QCDR service at a special rate per year, is now a part of the AANA Member Advantage Program. ABG’s Clinical Data Warehouse has been approved as a QCDR since 2015.
The capabilities of ABG include receiving data, calculating measure results for the measures selected, making the results available on their web site, and submitting the data to CMS on behalf of the healthcare provider. The ABG QCDR mission is to help Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) improve the quality and efficiency of the anesthesia care they provide. AGB strives to accomplish that goal in a way that is cost effective and does not interfere with the delivery of care.
ABG designed these measures so that anesthesia providers or their groups can easily find applicable and meaningful measures that meet all CMS requirements for obtaining PQRS credit. This tool will be instrumental in assisting CRNAs in the advancement of anesthesia.
The QCDR reporting mechanism was introduced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) in 2014 and will be a reporting mechanism under the new 2017 Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). A QCDR is a CMS-approved entity (eg, registry, certification board, or collaborative) that collects and submits quality measures data on behalf of individual eligible clinicians such as CRNAs as well as group practices (at the Tax Identification Number [TIN] level).
QCDRs also collect medical and/or clinical data for the purpose of patient and disease tracking to foster improvement in the quality of care provided to patients. Thus, a QCDR is different from a Qualified Registry as its purpose must be to improve quality of care beyond just submitting data to CMS for PQRS and now MIPS.
For example, CRNAs who work in the endoscopy or ambulatory surgical centers may find that non-PQRS measures offered by ABG QCDR are more applicable to their practice or setting. In addition to providing reports that are timely, informative, customizable, and always available, ABG’s QCDR also offers a hand-held, user friendly application—the QCDRapp—that collects all the information you need to meet your PQRS requirements in seconds. The QCDRapp is available and provided by Insight Medical Data Services, runs on iPhones, iPads, and android devices.
All database entries are made automatically with the QCDRapp, so no upload of database ID#s is necessary. Another benefit of using a QCDR is the extension of the measures data deadline to CMS. For the 2016 PQRS reporting year, measures data is due to CMS by March 31, 2017. For the ABG QCDR, clients need to submit their measures data by March 1, 2017 to assure that ABG can meet the CMS deadline for the 2016 PQRS reporting year.
About the American Association of Nurse AnesthetistsFounded in 1931 and located in Park Ridge, Ill., and Washington, D.C., the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) is the professional organization representing more than 50,000 Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) and student registered nurse anesthetists across the United States. As advanced practice registered nurses and anesthesia specialists, CRNAs administer approximately 43 million anesthetics to patients in the United States each year and are the primary providers of anesthesia care in rural America. In some states, CRNAs are the sole anesthesia professionals in nearly 100 percent of rural hospitals. For more information, please visit www.aana.com and www.future-of-anesthesia-care-today.com.
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