Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

CMS Seeks to Track Post-ASC Hospitalizations

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has announced a new initiative to track hospital admissions among Medicare patients who have recently been served at an ambulatory surgical center. The new measure would become part of the agency’s broader quality reporting efforts. The federal government has a large stake in the performance of ambulatory surgical centers: it spends $4 billion a year on care for more than three million Medicare patients at such facilities. Learn more about the project CMS calls “Development of a Facility-Level Quality Measure of Unplanned Hospital Visits after General Surgery Procedures Performed at Ambulatory Surgical Centers” [...]

Participation in Alternative Payment Models Rises

In 2017 nearly 360,000 clinicians will participate in Medicare and Medicaid Alternative Payment Model programs sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. CMS also reports that this year 570 accountable care organizations, including 131 that bear risk, will serve more than 12.3 million Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. In addition, nearly 3000 primary care practices will participate in advanced primary care medical home models Find more about the growth of participation in CMS’s alternative payment models, including descriptions of the different models and breakdowns in the numbers of participants, in this CMS news release.