AHA asks Trump to change CMS regulations
On December 2, the American Hospital Association (AHA) sent a letter to president-elect Donald Trump asking him to reform CMS regulatory requirements. This is the second letter the group sent the president-elect in the space of three days.
The AHA has 43,000 individual members and nearly 5,000 member hospitals in its ranks. AHA CEO and President Rick Pollack wrote that the balance between flexibility in patient care and regulatory burden was at a tipping point. He continues to say that reducing administrative complexity would save billions annually and allow providers to spend more time on patients, not paperwork.
“[CMS] and other agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released 43 hospital-related proposed and final rules in the first 10 months of the year alone, comprising almost 21,000 pages of text,” he wrote. “In addition to the sheer volume, the scope of changes required by the new regulations is beginning to outstrip the field’s ability to absorb them. Moreover, this does not include the increasing use of sub-regulatory guidance (FAQs, blogs, etc.) to implement new administrative policies.”
The letter includes a list of 33 changes the AHA wants to be made, including
• Suspend hospital star ratings
• Suspend electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) reporting requirements
• Delete faulty hospital quality measures
• Have readmission measures reflect socioeconomic factors
• Cancel stage 3 of “meaningful use” program.
• Stop federal agencies (HHS, CMS) from forcing private sector accreditors (Joint Commission, DNV, HFAP) to conform with government accreditation standards
• Refocus the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) on certifying electronic health records