Silva added that although Dr. Tom Price, the incumbent Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, may not be a fan of these reforms, it is unlikely that he would interfere with them.

"Price doesn't like meaningful use rules (for electronic health records) but that doesn’t mean he will cancel current MIPS requirements," said Silva. "MIPS is doable, if onerous."

Silva made a case for the need for quality versus quantity, the principle behind MIPS. He noted that the 1999 Institute of Medicine report "To Err is Human" and subsequent studies indicated that as many as 100,000 patients die every year due to poor quality controls in medicine and care.

Dr. J. Raymond Geis, FACR, a radiologist from Ft. Collins, Colorado, the third and final presenter in the session, talked about the need for radiologists to become masters of data in order to succeed under MIPS.

"Whoever has the best data, wins," he told the audience. "We're figuring out how to pay for another type of system ... and we're getting paid for value (not volume). We may not know what that is yet but we do know it's linked to our ability to transmit data."

Geis demonstrated Triad, a reporting platform he helped develop for radiologists through his work on the Commission of Informatics at the ACR, and advised his colleagues to start implementing a system right away if they haven't already.

"Every specialty is working to get 100 percent of payments under MIPS and they are all descending on hospital IT departments to get their platform live," said Geis.

He predicted that in a few years, once MIPS is fully implemented, most doctors will see marginal compensation increases or decreases. He also advised that new data and business models may be necessary for radiologists to prove their value.

"The MIPS rollout might dent, but it will not wreck, radiologists practices," he said.

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