CMS Removes Medicare Requirements Identified as Unnecessary, Obsolete or Excessively Burdensome

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced it would relieve the burden on healthcare providers and save them over $1 billion a year by removing Medicare requirements considered unnecessary, obsolete, or excessively burdensome, reports Healthcare Finance News . The rule would remove requirements for ambulatory surgical centers to perform pre-surgical assessments and instead defer to the operating physician's judgment to ensure that patients are assessed appropriately. Another provision would eliminate a duplicative requirement on transplant programs to submit data and other information more than once for "re-approval" by Medicare. A third proposal would allow multi-hospital systems to have a unified and integrated quality assessment and performance improvement program for all of their member hospitals instead of having individual staff for each separately certified hospital. An emergency preparedness proposed rule, meanwhile, would revise requirements for annual reviews to allow facilities to review their plans at least every two years.