Last week the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published a proposal detailing how it envisions paying for Medicare services in FY 2019 under its inpatient prospective payment system.
The following are the proposed rule’s highlights:
- A 1.75 percent proposed increase of inpatient rates.
- A $1.5 billion increase in the Medicare DSH uncompensated care payment pool during year two of the three-year phase-in of the use of S-10 uncompensated care data to calculate those payments.
- The renaming of CMS’s “meaningful use” program to “promoting interoperability,” accompanied by major cuts in the number of measures hospitals must report as part of Medicare’s various quality programs.
- A greater emphasis on the exchange of health care data among providers.
- Several changes involving the Medicare area wage index system.
- Several requests for information: one on promoting the exchange of data among hospitals, one on how to foster greater transparency of hospital prices, and one seeking recommendations for regulatory and policy changes to the Medicare wage index.
In the next three days this site will present more details about aspects of the proposed regulation that are of greatest interest to private safety-net hospitals. The following is a list of what will be covered:
- Tuesday – inpatient rates, Medicare disproportionate share (Medicare DSH) and the Medicare cost report’s S-10 worksheet, and the Medicare area wage index
- Wednesday – multi-campus hospitals, the Medicare and Meidcaid electronic health record (EHR) incentive programs, and the Medicare hospital readmissions reduction program
- Thursday – the Medicare value-based purchasing program, the hospital inpatient quality reporting program, electronic clinical quality measures, and price transparency
You also can learn more by reviewing the proposed 1883-page rule here or reading the CMS fact sheet here.
