The United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking new ideas on how to decrease the administrative burden for healthcare providers, with a special focus on “unnecessary paperwork.” This RFI solicits additional public comment on ideas for regulatory, subregulatory, policy, practice, and procedural changes that reduce unnecessary administrative burdens for clinicians, providers, patients and their families. Through these efforts, CMS aims to increase the quality of care, lower costs, improve program integrity, and make the health care system more effective, simple, and accessible.
The RFI is part of the Patients over Paperwork Initiative, which has been focused on streamlining regulations to “significantly cut the ‘red tape’ that weighs down our healthcare system” and takes clinicians’ attention away from treating their patients.
Through the RFI, CMS is looking for innovative ways that “broaden perspectives on potential solutions to relieve burden and ways to improve” the following areas: reporting and documentation requirements; coding and documentation requirements for Medicare/Medicaid payments; prior authorization procedures; policies and requirements for rural providers, clinicians, and beneficiaries; policies and requirements for patients dually enrolled (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid); beneficiary enrollment and eligibility determination; and CMS processes for issuing regulations and policies.
“Patients over Paperwork remains a top priority and a driving force in lowering healthcare costs,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “In step with the Trump Administration’s Cut the Red Tape initiative to reduce overly burdensome regulations across the federal government, Patients over Paperwork has made great inroads in clearing away needlessly complex, outdated, or duplicative requirements that drain clinicians’ time but contribute little to quality of care or patient health. We are doubling down on efforts to decrease healthcare costs by reducing administrative burden. In removing what doesn’t add value, we’re making room for what does. Our goal is to ensure that doctors are spending more time with their patients and less time in administrative tasks. Since launching Patients over Paperwork in late 2017, CMS has worked closely with the healthcare community to relieve regulatory burden and maintain flexibility and efficiency in Medicare and Medicaid, and we’re excited about the innovative ideas that today’s RFI will bring as we build on our progress and continue to achieve cost and time savings.”
The deadline to submit comments in response to the RFI is Monday, August 12, 2019.
Patients Over Paperwork
The Patients over Paperwork Initiative has been ongoing since the fall of 2017, and has already made some progress through January 2019. According to CMS estimates, the healthcare system will save an estimated 40 million hours and $5.7 billion through 2021, just through regulatory reform alone.
CMS has already worked to make changes to coding and documentation, including allowing initial prescriptions of immunosuppressive drugs to be shipped to an alternate address other than the beneficiary’s home to ensure timely access to these drugs when the beneficiary does not return home immediately after discharge.
Additional changes were made by implementing the Patient Driven Payment Model, a new case-mix classification system that applies to Medicare payments to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) beginning in October 2019. This innovative system will tie SNF payments to patients’ conditions and care needs rather than the quantity of services provided, and will simplify the current complicated paperwork requirements for patient assessments.
More information on the Patients over Paperwork initiative can be found here.