Mark E. Lutes, Chair of the firm’s Board of Directors and a Member of the Firm in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was featured in MCOL ThoughtLeaders and the MCOL Blog and discussed the question “How Much of a Game-Changer Is MACRA and the MIPS and APM Paths?”
Following is an excerpt:
In several years, looking back on the run-up to the payment impacts, MACRA is likely to be seen to have been a game changer-in two ways that are not within the story line. First, MACRA is likely to be regarded as an instigating event in physician practice consolidation, through the expansion of hospital employment, insurer physician practice transactions, specialty group growth and physician practice Management Company ventures 2.0. Even if the individual MIPS measures are viewed by individual and small groups of physicians as doable in the near term, there will be mental energy burned to comprehend them, software upgrades to support their reporting, and there will be a growing fear of the unknown as the resource use measures evolve. Therefore, probably the most predictable and predominate result of MACRA will not be the instigation of quality improvement and enhanced attention to resource use which the federal government intends, but another "nail in the coffin" of small scale medical practice. …
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Chair—Board of Directors / Member of the Firm