The Quality Payment Program (QPP) Developer Preview environment is now open for testing QPP submissions for performance year 2019.
As this is a testing environment it is updated when new functionality is released or changes are made to existing functionality. We will provide more information about what is included in future releases in follow up Google Group posts.
Changes to the QPP Submissions API for PY 2019 that are in the Developer Preview environment as of August 15, 2019:
- Removing QPP XML support - Beginning with the submission period for PY 2019, the QPP Submissions API will no longer accept QPP XML. Requests should be sent in QPP JSON. If you are submitting a QRDA III XML via direct API submission, please use the converter endpoint to convert to QPP JSON as has been the standard practice for the Submissions API.
- CEHRT ID for PI measurement sets - Beginning with the 2019 performance period, MIPS eligible clinicians must use EHR technology certified to the 2015 Edition certification criteria to report the 2019 Promoting Interoperability Objectives and Measures. This CEHRT ID must be submitted to QPP as a part of the submitted PI category measurement set data. It will be submitted on the measurement set level.
- New field "observationInstances" for nonproportion metric type - We updated the nonproportion metricType to include a new field called “observationInstances”. Observation Instances are defined as the number of denominator eligible instances that are used as input in the calculation to derive the numerator (i.e. average, ratio). We will provide a separate post detailing how this relates to reporting nonproportion measures.
Changes to the QPP Submissions API for PY 2019 that are not complete or available in the Developer Preview environment as of August 15, 2019:
- Deprecating submitting eCQMs and MIPS CQMs in the same quality measurement set -
Starting with PY 2019, you will need to submit these as separate measurement sets. This requires making TWO POST /measurement-sets requests with different submissionMethods if you are calling the API directly or uploading a file as a registry user on qpp.cms.gov. If providing a file for your client to upload themselves, you can include TWO quality measurement sets within ONE POST /submission (the format for sending all three categories at once). At this time we have removed "registry" as a valid submission method for measures that are eCQM-only. Error messaging will be added in a later release. We will provide more information about how to submit these in a separate follow up post.
- Low Volume Threshold Opt In process - This is still under development and is not live in the Developer Preview yet. We will provide more information about how this will be handled via direct API calls for those that submit directly to the API in a separate follow up post. You will be able to test this functionality using the new Test Data Services. Details on how to test that will be provided once the functionality is released in Developer Preview.
- Score endpoints are currently not available - The POST /score-preview and GET /score endpoints are not currently available in the Developer Preview environment. We are making changes to the score response based on the new PY 2019 aggregate measure scoring rule. We will turn these endpoints back on when that functionality is complete and documentation is made public.