At its core, the health care industry is a service-oriented one; it always has been. Only recently, with the realization that patient experience significantly impacts practice reputation, hospitals and medical practices have taken strides to consider patient satisfaction and perspective when delivering care.

The biggest contribution to improving patient care has been direct feedback from patients themselves. For better or for worse, patients are empowered to comment on the quality of care they receive. For example, in the case of chronic care management, patients are no longer considered low priority due to low fee-for-service returns. However, feedback can also have its issues as patients are human beings who do not necessarily understand the implications of health care operations or the intricacies of the health care system.

The Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) is the most recent iteration of tying health care organizations' reporting on the quality of their care processes and health outcomes to financial incentives and organizational reputation. We are in Year 3 of the MIPS program and on the heels of Year 1's Medicare reimbursements (2017). (The 2018 MIPS feedback report will be released by The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mid-2019.)

In the columns following this introductory one, I will delve further into how MIPS scores and other forms of health care data impact and can be leveraged by medical providers for operational and patient experience optimization. Setting the stage with a breakdown of what MIPS and its scores are, poking at its missteps alongside its successes, will help set the stage on how medical-focused software can help providers do their jobs better.