On May 10, 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) released two final rules revising the Medicare Conditions of Participation and updating Medicare regulations to eliminate outdated and burdensome requirements. These rules are a response to President Obama’s executive order requiring federal agencies to reduce unnecessary burdens on business and to achieve a more effective and streamlined regulatory framework. Most of the rule changes are designed to provide hospitals with flexibility to implement applicable alternatives as they see fit.
The final rules were published in the Federal Register on May 16, 2012, and closely resemble the proposed rules that we described in our December 2011 alert titled Easing the Burden of Medicare Regulations: Round-Up of New Final and Proposed Rules. Among other changes and clarifications, the rules require a member of the medical staff to serve on the hospital’s governing body and allow the flexibility for a hospital to add non-physician practitioners to its medical staff and to be governed by a single governing body over a multi-hospital system. The final rules did not, however, finalize the CMS proposal that physicians and non-physicians be able to be granted privileges without becoming members of the medical staff, based on public comments that, among other things, raised concerns related to quality improvement initiatives, peer review protections, and due process procedures afforded by medical staff membership.
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