Patients Before Paperwork Update:
- On August 3, 2020 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued its Physician Fee Schedule and Quality Payment Program proposed rule. A number of the proposals are aimed at reducing administrative burden, especially in the telehealth services space. CMS expressed that future changes will support a variety of HHS goals, including reducing administrative burden. The Regulatory Affairs team at ACP has been working hard to advocate for many of the proposals and will continue to work with CMS to reduce administrative burden and clinical documentation burden.
- ACP recently responded to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Urban Institute's Request for Public Feedback on the Draft Voluntary User-Reported Criteria for the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Reporting Program. ACP encouraged ONC and the Urban Institute to focus revisions to the criteria on collecting information through a process that is not too time-consuming and burdensome to clinical end users. Likewise, we recommended that the criteria should gather specific information that is targeted at and useful to clinical end users.
If you'd like to work with your chapter to advocate for regulatory relief during the COVID-19 crisis, please visit ACP's Chapter Advocacy Toolkit for more resources and calls to action.
ACP Patients Before Paperwork Initiative
Patients Before Paperwork is an ACP initiative designed to reinvigorate the patient–physician relationship by challenging unnecessary practice burdens. To help the Patients Before Paperwork Initiative, provide your feedback with our online data collection tool and contact the Patients Before Paperwork team directly at policy-regs@acponline.org.
Back to the September 18, 2020 issue of ACP IM Thriving