Impact of MACRA on the healthcare industry

The MACRA rule brings much more transparency to healthcare than ever before. It will accelerate a lot of changes, where we will move from just treating acute illnesses after they occur toward a public health type of practice in the U.S. There will be a reduction in the way dollars are currently spent with all the rescue care that we do. We can’t afford to increase healthcare spending; it’s already a $3 trillion industry. There will be more cost savings involved as we reduce waste and minimize errors, the latter through the patient safety issues that are being promoted through MACRA.

Right now we are independent practices siloed by affiliation, practice, payment mechanisms, and geography. MACRA will provide some hope on the interoperability frontier. It will take some steps toward actually developing a system of care.

MACRA will reduce the amount of mandatory regulatory reporting by streamlining the reporting process for small practices that don’t have the wherewithal of larger systems. CMS will be using claims-based data to track some of the measures and simplify the reporting. And physicians will be able to choose which programs they are part of, so their reporting requirements will be aligned with that choice. There will generally be much more control of what gets reported through this program.
 
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