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.
On Tuesday this space features a summary of the proposed changes in inpatient rates, Medicare disproportionate share payments (Medicare DSH) and how they would be calculated, and proposed changes in the Medicare area wage index system. Yesterday we looked at proposed changes in regulations governing multi-campus hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record incentive programs, and the hospital readmissions reduction program.
Today we describe proposed changes in various Medicare quality efforts.
Value-Based Purchasing Program
CMS proposes removing ten measures from its value-based purchasing program, all of which are already included in other Medicare reporting requirements: all seven health care-associated infection and patient safety measures and three condition-specific payment measures. See the CMS fact sheet for a list of the specific measures and the rationale for their removal.
Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program
CMS proposes removing certain measures from the hospital inpatient quality reporting program while retaining those same measures in one of its other value-based purchasing programs. CMS is focusing on measures that provide opportunities to reduce both paperwork and reporting burden on providers and patient-centered outcome measures rather than process measures. See the CMS fact sheet for specific information about a measure to be added, 18 to be removed, and 21 that will be extracted from the data hospitals report for other programs.
Electronic Clinical Quality Measures
For 2019, CMS proposes that hospitals report on only four self-selected measures (of the current 16 measures) only for a self-selected quarter of the calendar year. It also proposes that the submission period for the EHR incentive program be the two months following the end of the calendar year. Finally, it proposes eliminating eight of the 16 clinical quality measures starting with the 2020 reporting year. See the CMS fact sheet for further information.
Price Transparency
A major theme of this year’s proposed rule is increasing the transparency of hospital charges. Under current law, hospitals are required to establish and make public a list of their standard charges. To encourage price transparency by improving public access to charge information, CMS proposes updating its guidelines to specifically require hospitals to make public a list of their standard charges on the Internet.
Request for Information Regarding Price Transparency
CMS believes patients face challenges because of insufficient price transparency, including patients being surprised by out-of-network bills for physicians who provide services at in-network hospitals and patients being surprised by facility fees and physician fees for emergency room visits. For this reason, it is seeking feedback from the public regarding how CMS should define what are standard charges; about what kind of pricing information the public would find useful; about whether hospitals should be required to disclose what Medicare pays them for individual services; and about how CMS should enforce whatever transparency standards it ultimately adopts.
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You also can learn more by reviewing the entire proposed 1883-page rule here or reading the CMS fact sheet here.
