Quality Reporting, Data Feedback Made Easy Through PsychPRO

Membership in PsychPRO, APA’s mental health registry, has grown continuously since its inception in 2016, with over 300 psychiatrists and mental health professionals now on board and receiving feedback to evaluate their quality performance and meet quality reporting requirements.

APA members attending the Annual Meeting in New York who want to learn more about this increasingly popular member benefit should be sure to visit the PsychPRO booth located in APA Central in the Exhibit Hall in the Javits Center. Members may participate in the registry at no cost.

PsychPRO (Psychiatric Patient Registry Online) meets multiple needs. “An important purpose of PsychPRO is to help psychiatrists and other mental health professionals meet CMS’s new Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) quality reporting requirements,” APA Director of Research Philip Wang, M.D., Dr.P.H., said. “As a Qualified Clinical Data Registry certified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, PsychoPRO is a way to help those clinicians who qualify to meet reporting requirements avoid reimbursement penalties and potentially achieve bonuses from the MIPS program, as well as automatically meet their requirements for Maintenance of Certification Part IV.”

The registry will also help participants track progress and outcomes of their patients and improve care over time. PsychPRO includes over 30 MIPS quality measures and several patient-reported outcome screenings and assessments for measurement-based care of child/adolescent and adult populations.

“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 there are plans to ensure that PsychPRO content is aligned across quality reporting systems and programs (such as Medicare and The Joint Commission) and across other data and informational needs required by the field for all patient populations.

Solo practitioners who do not use electronic health records can participate in PsychPRO to meet their MIPS reporting requirements by using the registry’s clinician and patient portal to collect and store “patient-recorded outcome measures” (PROMS). 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 clinicians to track patients’ progress over time. These PHQ-9 data along with other data entered by the clinician are used to calculate specific quality measures.

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

Moreover, PsychPRO will be a source for the development of clinically valid performance measures unique to psychiatry. “PsychPRO is the field’s tool for the development, testing, and implementation of new quality measures that better reflect the excellent care given by mental health professionals,” Wang said. “PsychPRO currently includes 10 non-MIPS quality measures, and we plan to implement a rigorous and evidence-based measure-development process to set the standard in mental health care quality measurement.”

“Although quality reporting is increasingly being asked for by payers and being tied to reimbursements, meeting these requirements can be burdensome for clinicians,” Wang said. “PsychPRO is a tool being developed by APA to help members more easily meet these new requirements.” ■

Those interested in learning more about PsychPRO can view a short video and obtain more information here.