The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is working on initiatives aimed at alleviating providers’ burden and simplifying federal regulations, Administrator Seema Verma wrote in a blog post earlier this month.
She suggested a scaled-back payment and quality reporting system, according to an article in McKnight’s magazine.
Verma began the post with her personal experience witnessing the impressive quality healthcare professionals provided to her husband during a recent health crisis. “Our agency must make it easier for them to focus on doing the work that patients and families need them to do without causing them to be subject to excessive regulatory and administrative burden,” she wrote.
CMS is currently working on initiatives to be announced soon that will “ease the burden our government places on healthcare providers,” according to the article. The agency will continue efforts to ask providers how it can simplify regulations.
Among the requirements that could be targeted as part of the new initiative are “unnecessarily time-consuming” documentation for payment and quality reporting; electronic health records that have “distanced” providers from their patients, and new payment models that have “added yet another layer of rules and requirements.”
“This shift is now having a negative impact on patient care, hindering innovation, and increasing healthcare costs,” Verma wrote. “We are listening, integrating the feedback we hear into our work at CMS, and making changes that will make it easier for doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to do what they entered medicine to do: take care of those in need.”
Verma’s post came roughly one week after CMS proposed changes to several of its bundled payment initiatives favoring voluntary participation over mandatory models, according to the article.
