Submitting Measures and Activities for MIPS

The ACR MIPS Participation Portal will be ready to submit data to CMS daily beginning in early January. Activities and measures will be submitted once you have attested to the accuracy of your data and clicked the "Submit to CMS" button. We recommend you complete the attestation and finalize your selections no later than March 15, but typically the MIPS deadline is March 31 (at 8pm ET). See CMS Submission Overview for details on how to complete attestation, and refer to Select Quality Measures and Select Improvement Activities and ACI Measures for details on how to make changes.



MIPS Final Score

CMS will calculate your overall MIPS score as the weighted average of your Quality, Improvement Activities (IA), Promoting Interoperability (PI) and Cost scores. Scores for each performance category are capped at 100%. The final weights of the MIPS performance categories are: Quality - 30%, Cost - 30%, Promoting Interoperability - 25%, Improvement Activities - 15%, giving participants a final score between 0 and 100. 


Many (but not all) radiologists are exempt from the Promoting Interoperability and Cost categories. In this scenario, the weight of these two categories is typically reweighted to the Quality category, except in the case of small practices where the weight is distributed between Quality and Improvement Activities. For most exempt practices, Quality will be weighted at 85% with IAs at 15%, while small practices would have Quality weighted at 50% and IAs at 50%.


CMS no longer calculates a preliminary score for MIPS participants upon submission, but ACR's MIPS Participation Portal will attempt to estimate your score. Visit the "Preliminary Score Preview" tab in the MIPS Portal and tell us about your anticipated reweighting scenarios. ACR will then use your measure data to estimate your Quality score, IA score, and preliminary final score. 


Payment Adjustments

Your final score determines your payment adjustment. The maximum range of payment adjustments for MIPS is -9% to +9%. MIPS eligible clinicians who do not submit any data will receive a score of 0 for the participation year which will lead to an automatic -9% payment adjustment during the payment year (two years after the performance year).


MIPS is a budget neutral program, meaning that the amount of positive adjustments is balanced by the amount of negative adjustments. This means that early in the MIPS program when most users were scoring higher than the performance threshold, positive adjustments were uniformly low. As the performance threshold has steadily increased, and with it the number of participants falling below the threshold, the upper range of positive payment adjustments has increased.