Thank you for your thoughtful feedback on the Preventive Care and Screening: Screening for Depression and Follow-Up Plan measure used across CMS programs. Please note that specifications are aligned to the extent possible based on the data collection source, which is more stringent with electronic clinical quality measures. (In this case, clinician interpretation would not be a coded result). We will continue to explore how to improve alignment with the specifications during their respective update cycles.

We have been a MSSP ACO beginning in 2005 with the Physician Group Practice Demonstration Project. We are seeking guidance on the change in the wording for the screening for depression and follow-up plan from the CMS Web Interface V8.0 collection type when compared to the Medicare CQM and eCQM collection types. We are concerned regarding the pushback we will receive from primary care clinicians if we require them to refer all patients with a positive score to another provider for additional evaluation or bring them back for another visit when in their clinical opinion the patient does not have a diagnosis of depression.