Following up on a requirement from the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a request for information seeking feedback from providers and insurers about what they do to improve health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with social risk factors.

The RFI seeks to learn more about how insurers and providers identify Medicare patients with social risk factors, address those factors, and determine how much their efforts cost and whether they were effective.

The information HHS gathers will be part of a report due to Congress by October of 2019.  It will be the second such report resulting from the IMPACT Act:  the first, submitted to Congress in 2016, focused on socioeconomic information already available in Medicare data and relied heavily on work performed by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine under contract with HHS.

Comments are due to HHS by November 16.

Go here to see the RFI “IMPACT Act Research Study:  Provider and health plan approaches to improve care for Medicare beneficiaries with social risk factors.”