Meeting Offers Opportunities to Learn More About Measurement-Based Care and PsychPRO

Mental health professionals attending this year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco can learn how to use APA’s PsychPRO (Psychiatric Patient Registry Online) to implement measurement-based care in their practice during the session “Quality Measurement With PsychPro: MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) and Beyond.”

Speaking at the session will be Diana Clarke, Ph.D., APA deputy director of research and senior epidemiologist/research statistician, and Debra Gibson, M.Sc., epidemiologist and PsychPRO manager. The discussant will be Gregory Dalack, M.D., APA treasurer and a member of the Council on Quality Care.

The session is designed to highlight PsychPRO’s performance in its inaugural year in terms of quality reporting and helping psychiatrists to meet Maintenance of Certification Part IV requirements; explore the use of PsychPRO in the implementation of quality measurement in a variety of practice settings, and highlight the use of PsychPRO as a quality improvement tool and facilitation of measurement-based care as well as quality measure development.

Members who want to learn more about PsychPRO and possibly join the registry should also drop by the PsychPRO booth in APA Central in the Exhibit Hall.

Importantly, PsychPRO and its participants are now poised to make significant contributions to quality measurement in mental health care. APA was one of seven organizations to receive funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to develop health care quality measures to improve the outcomes of patients.

APA Director of Research Philip Wang, M.D., Dr.P.H., told Psychiatric News that mental and substance use disorders were identified as a priority under CMS’s new Meaningful Measures Framework, which is an organizing framework for identifying the highest priorities and assessing critical core issues to outline concrete quality measure topics for the field to develop.

“An important purpose of this quality measure development initiative through PsychPRO is to put psychiatrists and mental health professionals at the forefront of creating clinical quality measures that are meaningful to patients and providers and that reflect best-practice care as determined by experts,” he said. “As a Qualified Clinical Data Registry certified by CMS, PsychoPRO and its participants will have an important say in how and what gets measured in the new value-based payment paradigm.”

Meanwhile, PsychPRO continues to offer an easy, streamlined way to collect and calculate quality data for a variety of reporting needs, as well as automatically meet the requirements for Maintenance of Certification Part 4. PsychPRO will transmit 2018 quality performance data to CMS’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) for over 600 psychiatrists and mental health professionals, up from about 300 in 2017. Most achieved a high-performer status and will receive a small bonus with their 2019 Medicare Part B reimbursements.

“As we continue to build PsychPRO, we are implementing the platform as a complete tool that provides not only data collection and measurement with user-friendly feedback mechanisms—such as a dashboard with benchmarks—but also patient engagement tools, decision support, and other educational and training information and resources,” Wang said.

He added that with the measure development initiative, PsychPRO content will be aligned across quality-reporting systems and programs (such as Medicare, Medicaid, The Joint Commission, and other accreditation organizations) and across other data.

Solo practitioners who do not use electronic health records (EHRs) can participate in PsychPRO by using the registry’s clinician and patient portals to collect quality outcome data. For instance, patients can enter responses to the PHQ-9 in the portal; the results are automatically scored and interpreted and then sent back to the clinician’s portal to track patient progress over time.

“As clinicians gain experience with the registry portal, they will find that it is a very efficient way to administer Patient Reported Outcome Measures with their patients and implement measurement-based care in their everyday practice,” Wang said.

PsychPRO also continues to develop integration solutions with the myriad EHR systems in use by psychiatrists and behavioral health professionals. Importantly, PsychPRO now has an integration solution for EPIC, a significant player when it comes to EHR systems in academic and large health care systems. This is a key advance that will allow for the adoption of PsychPRO in settings that serve the most ill patients for whom improvements in outcomes are the hardest to achieve. ■