The CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Rules
Podcast — Drug Pricing: How Are Payers Responding to the IRA?
Findings from Gibbins’ Annual Healthcare Bankruptcy Report
A Fond Farewell: Musings on the End of the Medicare Advantage Hospice Carve-In Demonstration
Video: Braidwood v. Becerra – Challenging the Affordable Care Act’s Preventive Services Coverage Provision – Thought Leaders in Health Law
Hospice and Home Health Survey Perspectives: A Conversation with Kim Skehan, VP of Accreditation at CHAP
Transparency and the Open Payments Program
Taking the Pulse, A Health Care and Life Sciences Video Podcast | Episode 173: Improving rural health care with Dr. Kevin Bennett, the Director of the Research Center for Transforming Health and the
Counsel That Cares - The Private Payer's Perspective on Value-Based Care
Podcast: Health Equity – Behind the Buzzwords – Diagnosing Health Care
A Very “Special” Episode: Amid Controversy, CMS Launches the Hospice Special Focus Program
Grace from CMS: Unexpected Good News on HIS and CAHPS Appeals
This Bandwagon Has a Broken Wheel: OIG Joins the Inconsistent Approach to Hospice GIP Claims
Behind the Curtain: Enhanced Provider Enrollment Oversight
Survey Woes: CMS Ramps Up Hospice Survey Program and Consequences
Inflation Reduction Act’s Drug Price Negotiation Provisions – What Now? – Diagnosing Health Care Podcast
A Glimpse Into the Other Side: Understanding the Perspective of Government Enforcers
I Understood There Would Be No Math: Audits, Extrapolations, and a New Set of Rules
Podcast: Inflation Reduction Act’s Drug Price Negotiation Provisions – What’s Next? - Diagnosing Health Care
Quick Takeaways From the 2024 Proposed Hospice Wage Index Rule
I am fresh back from Baltimore, Maryland, where I was on the faculty of AHLA’s annual Institute on Medicare and Medicaid Payment Issues. I have been on the faculty of this program for a dozen years, and am always thrilled to...more
Kim Brandt, partner at Tarplin, Downs & Young has long provided the healthcare community with her expertise in all things Washington, having spent substantial time at CMS, the OIG at HHS and on Capitol Hill. She’ll be...more
In recent months, the Kaiser Health Network (part of the Kaiser Family Foundation) has issued three reports scrutinizing the orthopedic industry and its practices. Each report articulates the stakeholder group’s concerns over...more
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published the Calendar Year (CY) 2019 Final Rule for the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS), which includes provisions related to Medicare physician payments as well...more
• Congress amended current law to prevent CMS from applying the “MIPS” payment adjustment to separately billed items like drugs and biologics, which will drastically reduce the total amount of payment adjustments to clinical...more
Although the sufficiency of medical records documentation supporting beneficiary diagnoses for Medicare Advantage (MA) risk adjustment has been on the OIG’s work plan since 2013, the Department of Justice has upped the ante...more
In October 2016, CMS issued a Final Rule for the new physician payment system under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). MACRA replaced the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) with a new...more
The Affordable Care Act added the Physician Payment Sunshine Act (Sunshine Act) as section 1128G to the Social Security Act. The Sunshine Act requires applicable manufacturers of drugs, devices, biologicals, or medical...more
On October 14, 2016, CMS issued its Final Rule for the new physician payment system under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). MACRA replaced the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) with a new...more
Furthering the agency’s stated intention to pay for value over volume, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently issued a proposed rule representing the first expansion of mandatory hospital-centric bundled...more
On September 8, 2016, CMS announced in a blogpost that new physician payment model reforms, established in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), will begin implementation on January 1, 2017, as...more
On July 13, 2016, CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt testified before the Senate Finance Committee regarding the possibility of a delay in implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). ...more
On June 14, 2016, during its annual meeting in Chicago, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates approved a resolution recommending the overhaul of CMS’s physician payment rate determination methodologies,...more
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) is expected to drastically change how physicians are paid by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Under the proposed rule, physicians will be given the...more
On September 28, 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published a Request for Information (RFI) seeking stakeholder comments related to innovative physician payment models required by the Medicare Access...more
CMS recently released data collected through the Open Payments Program in accordance with the Affordable Care Act from applicable manufacturers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) about payments and other transfers that...more
CMS recently released results of Medicare’s value-based payment modifier for 2015. This is the first year in which physicians are subject to adjustments under the payment system and, in this first phase of implementation,...more
Maybe it was a coincidence, but CMS waited until Halloween to announce its final 2015 payment policies for physicians and hospital outpatient departments. While the announced changes are not really scary, one evoked sharp...more
In the last issue, we reported on the difficulties faced by home health agencies (HHAs) in complying with the documentation requirements for the face-to-face (F2F) encounter between a patient and a physician before or shortly...more
Drug and device manufacturers breathing a sigh of relief after completing their 2013 data submissions under the Physician Payment Sunshine Act (the “Sunshine Act’) must now contend with four proposed changes to the Sunshine...more
In February 2013, we reported (on our Healthcare Law Blog) that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the final rule for the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. In the interest of providing more...more
Brace yourself for a reprise of the death panel debate of 2009. The AMA will soon formally recommend to CMS that physicians be paid—or “reimbursed” in health care-speak—for talking with Medicare patients and their families...more
In This Issue: - Transparency Latest Weapon against Rising Health Care Costs - Implementation of the Affordable Care Act - Other Federal Regulatory Initiatives - Other Congressional and State Initiatives -...more
The proposed 2014 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule [PDF] included reimbursement for case management to be made available in 2015 for physicians who treat patients with two or more complex conditions. The proposed rule would...more
After 34 years, a federal district court in Florida has overturned a 1979 injunction which prevented the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from releasing to the public Medicare data related to physician billing...more