Following a recent meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission during which commission members discussed the challenges inherent in attempting to identify safety-net hospitals, NASH has written to the agency to suggest that it consider a different approach to targeting such hospitals.

In its letter, NASH urges MedPAC to recommend that Medicare look not at individual hospitals and what kinds of patients they serve but to focus instead on vulnerable communities and then to identify the hospitals that are caring for meaningful proportions of the residents of those communities.  NASH also points MedPAC to data that could be used in such an approach:  the “PLACES” data developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Such a change in approach, NASH writes in its letter, “…would lay a much-needed foundation for changes in the Medicare payment system that reduce barriers to access to care by making it more feasible for hospitals to serve vulnerable populations.”

Go here to see NASH’s letter to MedPAC.