Depression Status Changes Align with CMS Quality Measure Updates Copied

Effective January 2021, CMS released significant updates to the depression screening measure that impact both the MIPS and OCM programs. These updates included the removal of two follow up options for patients with a positive depression screening to ensure that clinicians take action to treat or further diagnosis those patients.

Those options are Additional evaluation for depression and Suicide Risk Assessment. iKnowMed has been updated to reflect these changes in version 3.0.22.

Additional Evaluation for Depression

When documenting a patient’s depression status in Clinical Profile > Observations, you will notice that the Additional evaluation for depression option has been removed from the Plan section in iKnowMed version 3.0.22 as it is no longer valid for OCM and MIPS participants.

Suicide Risk Assessment

You will also notice that when documenting a patient’s depression status in Clinical Profile > Observations, choosing the Suicide Risk Assessment option and saving your changes results in the appearance of a new confirmation window notifying you that this option alone will not meet CMS requirements for MIPS and OCM programs.

You have the option for CONFIRM these changes and have it save to the patient’s chart, or you can click GO BACK to return to the previous screen and select an additional Plan option (see image below).

Correcting Previous Entries

Users can still view and edit previous depression screening entries for their patients. This allows you to correct all entries starting in January 2021 to meet the MIPS and OCM requirements. Be sure to select the acceptable Plan options as outlined above.