In the past few years, a variety of regulatory changes and new regulatory requirements have brought in a host of new, potentially confusing terms for anesthesiologists to grapple with. PQRS (Physician Quality Reporting System), QCDR (Qualified Clinical Data Registry), MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015), and MIPS (Merit-Based Incentive Payment System) add to our regulatory vocabulary, alongside stalwarts such as CPT (Current Procedural Terminology), ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision) and ICD-9-CM (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification). While the recent introduction of these terms has turned regulatory reporting into a bit of an alphabet soup, learning these terms and how they came to be is critical to understanding the technical underpinnings of our current and future reimbursement systems, and how those systems interact with quality reporting.
Why do we need to use a standardized set of terms for describing diseases and diagnoses? They...
