The Trump administration wants to make it easier to shop hospital prices and move doctors more quickly toward using electronic health records.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released proposed regulations Tuesday that would require hospitals to put their standard list of prices on the Internet, instead of the current requirement to make them available “in some form.” Administration officials heralded the regulation as part of an effort to boost transparency.
“This payment proposal takes important steps toward a Medicare system that puts patients in charge of their care and allows them to receive the quality and price information needed to drive competition and increase value,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
The proposed regulation also aims starting in 2019 to overhaul the CMS electronic health record incentive program called “Meaningful Use,” which entices doctors to adopt electronic health records. The program, which was renamed “Promoting Interoperability,” is now meant to give incentives to providers to “make it easier for patients to obtain their medical records electronically,” CMS said.
In addition to those changes, CMS is seeking comments on the best way to combat surprise billing by healthcare providers. The agency wants comments on how to “provide patients better information up front about the out-of-pocket costs they will face,” CMS added.
The agency also wants to know about new ways to encourage “further transparency” from providers such as tools to compare prices.
CMS is also exploring creating a new billing code for a new cancer treatment called CAR T-cell therapy, which aims to engineer new white blood cells to better target cancer cells.
The therapy is new, as the Food and Drug Administration approved only two CAR T therapies last year. One therapy is for younger patients and the other is for adults, both struggling with rare blood cancer. Both treatments cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There is no billing code currently that providers can use to charge Medicare for the therapy. So CMS is seeking comments on the best approach to handling the therapy.
The regulation and request for comments is part of a larger effort by HHS to try to revamp healthcare toward more value-based reforms. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also exploring legislation to boost transparency for prices of healthcare procedures.
