Washington Debrief: Federal Policy Committee Mulls Stage 3 Comments

Doc Fix Price Tag Decrease Means Permanent Fix Prospects Increase For “doc-fix” observers, this past week was busy in Washington.  First, the Congressional Budget Office  revised estimates of how much the sustainable growth rate will cost to fix.  According to CBO, a projected $138 billion will be required – not the $300+ billion previously projected – to offset the scheduled pay cuts to provider reimbursements.  Then, a bipartisan bill, sponsored by Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-Penn.) and Joe Heck (R-N.V.), was introduced that would use so called, “war-savings offsets.”  Finally, on Thursday of this week, leaders of the House Energy & Commerce and Ways & Means Committees announced their intentions to introduced a framework they will use to formulate a competing plan.  “It is time to bring Medicare into the 21st century," Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in a statement. "Achieving that goal will be an all hands on deck effort, and we want all the stakeholders — doctors, patients, and others — to be a part of that process.”

So who knows, 2013 may be the year that the docs get a permanent fix.  Stay tuned.

CHIME Weighs In on Federal Health IT Safety PlanResponding to ONC’s Patient Safety Action & Surveillance Plan, CHIME agreed with the proposed approach to leverage existing policy levers and programs within HHS, rather than create another federal entity to enhance health IT safety.  While CHIME urged the involvement of ONC in designing a framework to use health IT to make care safer and continuously improve the safety of health IT, the group suggested that implementation of the patient safety plan should rely on a stakeholder-driven organization that included federal partners, but was not under the direct control of federal agencies.

CHIME also urged a more focused effort to address patient data-matching, saying that, “despite years of development, no clear strategy has emerged to accurately and consistently match patient data.  The results of a 2012 CHIME survey suggest that now, more than ever, action is needed to ensure the right data is matched with the right patient.  Unintended injury or illness attributable to patient data-matching error is a considerable, and growing, problem in this era of health information exchange.  And with a substantial portion of CIOs involved with HIEs that use differing approaches to data matching, we can expect the inconsistency and variability inherent to healthcare IT systems to persist – and become more endemic – without national leadership and consistent standards.”  Finally, CHIME strongly urged that attention be paid to how much time and resources are expected of providers to report on safety events.  While the group supported the need for more information on patient safety events and believed the general approach ONC is suggesting (through AHRQ Common Framework and PSOs) is reasonable, CHIME said there is a significant danger in developing a reporting regime that unduly burdens providers.

Edited by Gabriel Perna