Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

CMS Shares Vision for Medicaid

Medicaid is about to undergo major changes, CMS administrator Seema Verma outlined in a news release yesterday and in a speech to state Medicaid directors. According to the news release, those changes include: re-establishing a state-federal partnership that Verma believes has become too much federal and not enough state giving states greater freedom to innovate offering new guidelines for how states can align their individual programs with federal Medicaid objectives new guidance on section 1115 waivers longer section 1115 waivers with simpler review processes CMS willingness to consider proposals to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries Medicaid and CHIP “scorecards” [...]

iqtsupport2017-11-08T13:00:50-05:00November 8, 2017|Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicaid, Medicaid regulations|

CMS Announces Drive to Reduce Paperwork

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is launching a new “Meaningful Measures” initiative that will seek to reduce the regulatory burden on health care providers. According to a CMS news release, Meaningful Measures …will involve only assessing those core issues that are most vital to providing high-quality care and improving patient outcomes. The agency aims to focus on outcome-based measures going forward, as opposed to trying to micromanage processes.. In a speech at the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, CMS administrator Seema Verma explained that this project will include moving the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation [...]

iqtsupport2017-11-02T06:00:16-04:00November 2, 2017|Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, 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” [...]

iqtsupport2017-07-14T06:00:56-04:00July 14, 2017|Medicaid regulations, Medicare|

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.

iqtsupport2017-01-27T06:00:22-05:00January 27, 2017|Accountable Care Organization, ACO, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicaid, Medicare|