2025 Advocacy Priorities
ACP’s Patients Before Paperwork Initiative is designed to reinvigorate the patient-physician relationship by reducing administrative burdens and ensuring physicians can focus more on direct patient care. Putting Patients First by Reducing Administrative Tasks in Healthcare makes policy recommendations to address the issue of administrative tasks to mitigate or eliminate their adverse effects on physicians, their patients, and the health care system.
ACP strongly advocates for regulations and policies to alleviate the overly burdensome administrative tasks faced by ACP members and their patients. ACP works directly with clinicians, administrators, lawmakers, and the stakeholder community to develop recommendations that ensure physicians can focus on patients' needs, address burdens and burnout, and offer education and solutions to mitigate these barriers.
Prior Authorization
Prior authorization is the number one cause of burdens on physicians and other health care professionals regarding care delivery. These resources provide tips and solutions to help practices mitigate the burdens of prior authorization.
ACP Toolkit (updated February 2024) addresses Prior Authorization reform and provides a comprehensive overview of the policy landscape and ways individuals can help advocate for reform at the state and federal levels.
What ACP is Doing
ACP and Medicine Forward
Webinars
Drugs, Devices, and DME
Insurance companies require prior authorization for some drugs and devices to ensure appropriateness.
- Electronic Prior Authorization videos – These 3 short videos from AMA address the advantages of using electronic prior authorization.
- Prior Authorization Tips – This tip sheet from AMA offers practical solutions and the pros and cons of each.
- Electronic Prior Authorization (ePA) – This 10-minute video series from the AMA outlines the burdens of the current manual PA processes, describes how pharmacy ePA can help improve prior authorization processing times, and explains how physicians can implement ePA in practice.
Imaging, Labs, Testing
Electronic Health Records
Electronic health records (EHRs) were created to streamline practice workflows and improve patient care, but they often also create burdens for health care practitioners. These resources are intended to provide tips and solutions on documentation, information sharing, and communicating using the patient portal to help practices mitigate some of these burdens.
Documentation
- State of the Note Summit 2021 – ACP worked with the EHR Association to develop tools to streamline clinical documentation, while avoiding “note bloat” and other burdensome documentation practices. These resources were intended to help physicians adapt to CMS’s 2021 E/M code changes and accompanying documentation requirements but are generally applicable to clinical documentation.
- Primary Care Do’s and Don’t’s – Tips on how to streamline clinical documentation for general internal medicine physicians.
- Medical Specialty Do’s and Don’t’s – Tips on how to streamline clinical documentation for specialists.
- Five Recommendations for EHRs:
- Automatically write in SOAP, and review in APSO
- Combine Patient Instructions and Assessment and Plan
- Automatically expand abbreviations for patient-facing documents
- Allow linking out to data that is elsewhere in the EHR
- Allow for simple inclusion of discrete exam data
- Health IT and Health Information Exchange Basics – Resources defining key aspects of health IT and summarizing the potential benefits of integrating technology into practices to improve patient outcomes, including through health information exchange, which allows clinicians and patients to securely access and share a patient’s medical information electronically.
Information Sharing
Patient Portal Communication
- Patient Portal Playbook – Chapter of the ONC’s Patient Engagement Playbook that offers tips on optimizing use of the patient portal using staff, application programing interfaces, and other technology.
- Sample Patient Portal Agreement – Model for developing an agreement with your practice’s patients.
- Virtual Check-in or Online Digital E/M codes – Virtual check-in codes can be used for brief conversations where a clinician seeks to determine whether an in-person visit is necessary. Online digital E/M codes can be used for patient-initiated interactions via the patient portal.
- Team Care: Communicating with Patients – Sample policies and procedures for communication with patients; to be used as-is or edited to meet the needs of your practice.
What ACP is Doing
Prescribing Medications
Managing multiple medications and counseling patients regarding use, cost, and side effects can be time consuming. These resources provide tools to help clinicians, staff, and patients manage their medications.
- Annual Prescription Renewal – Module that saves time and improves patient adherence.
- Needy Meds – Information about prescription assistance programs, free and low-cost clinics, government programs, and other assistance programs.
- Prescribe Generic Drugs
- Information for Consumers and Patients – Information for consumers on drug-related topics including side effects, medication use, and medication fraud, etc., from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
- Medication Checklist
- Medication Adherence Inventory
- Medication Management & Electronic Prescribing
- Improving Medication Adherence (Video) – Dr. Marie Brown and receptionist Ms. Rockett describe one way to improve medication adherence.
- Pearls from I.M. Peers: Improving Medication Adherence (ACP Internist Article and Video) – Martha Gray, MD, FACP, talks about increasing medication adherence.
- Substance Use Patient History
- Removal of Data Waiver (X-Waiver) Requirement - Information about Section 1262 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 on the removal of the federal requirement for practitioners to submit a Notice of Intent to prescribe medications, like buprenorphine, for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD), from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
- Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)-registered prescribers must complete a one-time eight-hour training on the treatment and management of patients with opioid or other substance use disorders starting on June 27, 2023.
What ACP is Doing
Private Payers
Private insurance companies and their differing policies, procedures, and payments add complexity to medical practice today. Visit our Private Payer page to learn more about what each individual payer is doing regarding behavioral and mental health, telehealth, prior authorization, value-based programs, Medicare Advantage, and more.
What ACP is Doing
Quality Reporting
The Quality Payment Program (QPP) aims to reduce burden and improve health outcomes for Medicare patients while rewarding high-value, high-quality Medicare clinicians. The QPP offers clinicians two tracks based on their practice size, specialty, location, or patient population. The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) builds on traditional fee-for-service payments by adjusting them up or down based on performance. Alternative Payment Models (APMs) financially reward clinicians for delivering high-quality, cost-effective care. Learn more about quality reporting by visiting our QPP page.
What You Can Do to Help
Share Your Experiences and Tips
This brief survey is a means to communicate administrative pain points with ACP staff, share best practices, and help inform additional tools and services.
- Tell us about your ideas to address administrative tasks.
- Provide examples or vignettes explaining how these tasks have had an impact on your ability to care for a patient.
- How can ACP best serve you to address these issues?
You may also contact us directly at policy-regs@acponline.org.
Search the ACP Policy Library
To access everything ACP has said related to Medicare reform issues search all policy statements, copies of testimony, and letters to government and non-government officials.
Search the Policy Library
