The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized a rule to empower patients and advance the White House MyHealthEData initiative and the CMS Patients Over Paperwork initiative. This final rule and others issued earlier this week will help improve access to hospital price information, give patients greater access to their health information, and allow clinicians to spend more time with their patients.
Individually and collectively, these final rules put patients first, ease provider burden, and make significant strides in modernizing Medicare. The final rule issued today makes updates to Medicare payment policies and rates under the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) and the Long-Term Care Hospital (LTCH) Prospective Payment System (PPS) that will incentivize value-based, quality care at these facilities. CMS also issued final rules this week on fiscal year (FY) 2019 Medicare payments and policies for the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) PPS, Inpatient Psychiatric Facility (IPF) PPS, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility (IRF) PPS, and the Hospice Wage Index and Payment Rate Update.
Along with policy changes, the FY 2019 IPPS/LTCH PPS final rule provides acute care hospitals an average payment increase of approximately 3%, which reflects rate updates required by law and payments for new technologies and uncompensated care.
The IPPS/LTCH PPS final rule also updates geographic payment adjustments for IPPS hospitals. CMS looks forward to continuing to work on geographic payment disparities, particularly for rural hospitals, to the extent permitted under current law and appreciates responses to our request for public input on this issue. By allowing the imputed wage index floor to expire for all-urban states, CMS has begun the process of making geographic payments more equitable for rural hospitals.
In addition, CMS is updating the LTCH PPS standard federal payment rate by 1.35%. Overall, under the changes included in the final rule, CMS projects that LTCH PPS payments will increase by approximately 0.9%, or $39 million in FY 2019. In addition, CMS is finalizing the proposal to eliminate the 25% threshold policy in a budget neutral manner.
For a fact sheet on the FY 2019 IPPS/LTCH PPS final rule (CMS-1694-F), please visit:
https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-sheets/2018-Fact-sheets-items/2018-08-02.html
