March 7, 2016 – CMS Mandate

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Anchor lead:  Do mandates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services improve healthcare? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, abbreviated CMS, claim that innovations the federal agency instituted saved almost 90,000 lives and billions of dollars last year.  Such changes are developed and then demanded of healthcare systems that receive federal monies under these programs.  Landon King, executive vice dean of medicine at Johns Hopkins, says sometimes these approaches fall short.

King: It’s a process that at least potentially lends itself to a cookie cutter approach to patient care or to the assessment of patient care when in fact not uncommonly the care of an individual patient is much more nuanced, because there is an overlay of multiple medical conditions, or multiple psychosocial issues that somehow, despite all good intentions, encroach on the validity of a particular measure.   :25

King says the good news is the agency does engage in dialogue with providers to assess the effectiveness of their strategies, so modification is possible.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.