On Tuesday the CMS announced its first Rural Health Strategy, which looks to improve access to and quality of care in rural areas. CMS Administrator Seema Verma said the effort looks to “apply a rural lens to the vision and work of the agency” and was the culmination of input from rural providers and beneficiaries.
Since the 1960s when the hospice movement really began, we have been slowly changing our approach to management of chronic illness. With the addition of palliative care, a defined medical specialty since 2006, we have been able to take the lessons learned in that nearly 60 years of hospice experience and apply them to not only the terminally ill, but also for chronic disease management.
Reducing the Merit-based Incentive Payment System reporting period to 90 consecutive days instead of one year would "reduce administrative burden and ensure physicians have sufficient time to report after receiving performance feedback from CMS," the American Medical Association argues in a letter sent to CMS Administrator Seema Verma.
As the Affordable Care Act increased the number of Americans with health coverage, 45% of adult ACA exchange enrollees had chronic conditions in 2014 and 2015. That’s a higher percentage than those with employer-based insurance and in nongroup plans not in the exchanges, according to a new study in Health Affairs.
Finally. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released an online tool that enables clinicians to determine whether they must participate in the Merit-Based Incentive Payment Program (MIPS) this year. CMS on Friday put out a notice that it has released an updated MIPS Participation Lookup Tool on its web site that will allow clinicians to check on their 2018 eligibility status.
In a March 19 letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the AAFP said the Advanced Primary Care Alternative Payment Model would help more than 200,000 primary care physicians promote coordinated care and provide incentives for practices to change the way patient care is delivered.
In 2018, the total cost of care for people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias is projected to reach $277 billion. That figure is expected to keep ballooning in coming years and decades, and a growing proportion of spending has been going toward in-home care.
Overall, the Chillmark Team was pleased to see progress on telehealth, as well as a broader understanding that healthcare organizations (HCOs) will get patient engagement right only when they assemble a comprehensive collaborative health record (CHR). On the other hand, they were disappointed in slow progress toward addressing two prominent public health issues — the opioid crisis and behavioral health — as we didn’t see many large-scale use cases for...
After a turbulent year in regulatory proposals for the home health care industry, providers need to be looking to 2018 with fresh eyes on what changes still lie ahead.
The CMS is inviting clinicians to participate in a year-long study to assess the burden of reporting under MACRA’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Participants will need to submit data for at least three measures in the MIPS Quality performance category, including one outcome measure, and take part in a virtual focus group.
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