The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is creating the Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics, designed to unify the agency’s efforts to reduce regulatory and administrative burden.
The new office, according to federal officials, is an outgrowth of the agency’s Patients over Paperwork (PoP) Initiative, which is the cornerstone of CMS’ ongoing efforts to eliminate duplicative, unnecessary, and excessively costly requirements and regulations. “This announcement permanently embeds a culture of burden reduction across all platforms of CMS agency operations,” officials stated.
The CMS announcement stated that the agency’s burden reduction work began three years ago with the launch of the PoP Initiative, which has focused on reducing unnecessary regulatory burden in order to allow providers to concentrate on their primary mission, which is patient care. The results are expected to save providers and clinicians $6.6 billion and 42 million unnecessary burden hours through 2021, CMS attests.
As part of its efforts to date, CMS has heard from over 2,500 providers, clinicians, administrative staff, healthcare leaders, beneficiaries and their support teams through 158 site visits and listening sessions. Through more than 10 requests for information (RFI) combined with stakeholder interviews, CMS also has over 15,000 comments to assist us in our burden reduction efforts.
Already, this work has removed unnecessary, obsolete, or excessively burdensome conditions of participation for hospitals and other healthcare providers saving an estimated 4.4 million hours of time previously spent on paperwork with an overall total projected savings to providers of $800 million annually, according to CMS estimates. It also led to the establishment of the Quality Payment Program (QPP), a consolidated data submission experience for the different performance categories of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) so that clinicians no longer need to submit data in multiple systems.
The new office will aim to strengthen CMS’ efforts across Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Health Insurance Marketplace to decrease the hours and costs clinicians and providers incur for CMS-mandated compliance, according to officials.
It will also be focused on taking a proactive approach to reducing burden, carefully considering the impact of new regulations on healthcare system operations, CMS said. The new office will additionally increase the number of providers and health plans the agency engages to help ensure that CMS has a better understanding of how various regulatory burdens impact healthcare delivery.
The office will put an increased emphasis on health informatics, as well. According to CMS, “Fostering innovation through interoperability will be an important priority, and the office will leverage technology and automation to create new tools that allow patients to own and carry their personal health data with them seamlessly, privately, and securely throughout the healthcare system. By providing clinicians with a complete medical history, they can deliver better coordinated, higher quality care. Coupled with implementation and enforcement of adopted national standards, this office will also work with the broader healthcare community to continue to make key administrative processes increasingly more efficient.”
The agency hasn’t yet specified who will lead the office.
