Healthcare providers are in for potentially billions of dollars in annual savings thanks to a recent CMS proposed rule that would cut down on administrative load. The savings would result from the simplification and streamlining of Medicare’s conditions of participation (CoP), coverage conditions, and additional obligations for participation for ambulatory surgical centers, transplant centers, and other healthcare facilities.
Should the rules eventually come to fruition, they would focus largely on hospitals and their administrative burdens by cutting down on the amount of paperwork. This will be done through several different means including but not limited to allowing hospitals flexibility with devising a medical staff policy describing the conditions under which a pre-surgery or pre-procedure assessment for an outpatient could be utilized in place of an encompassing medical history and physical examination. Money would also be saved by streamlining the requirements for rural hospitals. Critical access hospitals (CAHs) would have their policies and procedures review reduced from each year to biennial.
The CMS rules are part of a larger initiative launched last year called the Patients Over Paperwork Initiative which, as the name implies, aims to cut down on the administrative burdens providers deal with by participating in Medicare.
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