By Tim Rowan, Writer and Editor of National Health Report
A Brief History of National Nurses Week
National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6th and ends on May 12th, Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
The nursing profession has been supported and promoted by the American Nurses Association (ANA) since 1896. Each of ANA’s state and territorial nurses associations promotes the nursing profession at the state and regional levels.
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared on the ANA web page, https://pages.nursingworld.org/ana-2035_nnw19_phase2 It may be freely reproduced.
by Tim Rowan, editor and publisher of Home Care Technology Report
In late 2018, CMS announced it would remove the rural setting as the only form of reimbursement for telehealth. Until new reimbursement models for remote patient monitoring in home health take shape, the U.S. the Healthcare division of Royal Philips is turning to hospitals, payers, and ACOs to keep sales strong. We spoke with General Manager of Population Health Management Niki Buchanan to learn about the company’s population health program.
[The future of the program is sketched out as follows: While CMS ponders a new reimbursement structure, Philips’ Population Insights and Care Group is piloting its population health effort with ACOs. Other partners will include health systems and Medicare Advantage companies. Home health agencies, perennially a light investor in home telehealth technologies, are not expected to be in the mix. “We will be working with partners to allow them to work with ACOs,” Buchanan told us. “Once there has been an initial diagnosis and an in-person visit, we will provide technology patients can use to communicate with their personal physician and family members.”Philips’ population health programs focus on patient cohorts most at risk for rehospitalization after discharge, such as persons with multiple chronic conditions. Care managers interact with patients that have been identified with data analytics tools. First contact occurs during hospital discharge and continues for 45 to 90 days. We design the most appropriate monitoring system for their condition. It may or may not include video visits. It may be regular telephone check-ins. The 2019 Physician fee schedule includes new HCPCS codes relating to heart, diabetes, and COPD that have created a way for physicians to be paid for remote monitoring.]
Buchanan explained that work with hospital systems, ACOs, and payers includes segmentation and stratification of population cohorts under their care. “We use that analysis to help clinicians find the right patients to resolve care through scalable care management opportunities, from those who need only low-tech, high-touch care to advanced monitoring for those with multiple chronic conditions.”
Another differentiator that Buchanan described is the plan to survey patients about their feelings, to get a picture of loneliness and mental health that can be shared with clinicians. Some patients will receive medication management devices that allow adherence to medication instructions to be shared with clinicians and caregivers. “If someone is not compliant,” she explained, “he can receive reminders.”
The overall strategy is to make the home the center of care, bringing in opportunities for family and others to be part of the care team. The goal, as always, is to reduce readmissions and facilitate a hospital’s ability to have earlier discharges. “ACOs are looking for revenue and improved patient outcomes to report,” Buchanan emphasized. An example of the program’s efficacy comes from New York Presbyterian, at which Philips has helped NYP design a program to reduce hospital length of stay, preventable readmissions, and frequent, costly ED visits. As part of its broader population health effort, NYP has also implemented telehealth systems right in the Emergency Department. People can consult with specialists who may not even be at that NYP hospital.
The specialist can decide to admit or determine this is a non-emergency and schedule an appointment. Equipment in “The Telehealth Room” must be sanitized between users but it is still a fast way to reduce wait times. NYP also allows patients to go to a Walgreens where they have installed similar telemonitoring rooms. “Soon they will have telestroke technology in their ambulances,” she added. “We are looking for many non-standard ways to care for co-morbid patients.”
[This is what is noted about the program’s use of telehealth equipment. As Buchanan notes: “Patients may prefer to use their own device,” and so, if patients have their own devices, they can use them.
The author also poses a question in this article: “Where is home healthcare?To answer: she notes that Buchanan explains– in order to evaluate the success of a program like this one, you need large numbers of patients in your analytics database — preferably five times the number of current patients in order to meet your quality metric goals. In the case of NYP, Philips examined claims data and analyzed it for 30 days to identify all co-morbid CHF patients. By then, assigning them a Johns Hopkins acuity score, NYP was able to focus its population health efforts on high- and medium-acuity patients.
“When we first tried a program like this three years ago, we started with home care agencies. But it turned into a tremendous cost to our business because an HHA would put [only] 10 or 15 patients on their telehealth service. The amount of work for that small of a number never made the cost-benefit. So we pivoted strategies last year to focus on partners that have an expanded, cohort mix of patients, which turned out to be IDNs and healthcare systems, payers, ACOs, and pharmacies. Our recent acquisition of Blue Willow will help us expand to monitoring residents in SNFs.”]
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
By Darcey Trescone, RN, BSN
Population health is a relevant topic in our space, and there are technology providers that are taking it a step further with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). I had the opportunity to meet with Jeremy Powell, CEO and Founder from Acclivity Health Solutions to discuss their vision for the post-acute space and how they are utilizing data to support that vision. [Tresone presents highlights from this interview in the following abstract:]
Trescone: You talk about coming from the acute care space. Can you elaborate?
Powell: Our initial work was around acute, integrated delivery networks. We have always been in technology, with an understanding that healthcare is rich in the kind of data that it creates. The ability to express that data where it’s most needed is at the point of care.
Trescone: Where does the data in the Acclivity system come from?
Powell: The data from Acclivity comes from EMR systems, clinical aggregation solutions like Clinically Integrated Networks (CINs), Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), administrative and financial information from claims/benefit systems, and other augmented data sets like case management, population health, and analytics tooling, as well as pharmacy benefits and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) data.
Trescone: Why is Acclivity interested in transitioning to the post-acute healthcare space?
Powell:Our interest is twofold. It is personal, and it is our mission. Most everyone who finds his way into post-acute health has a personal story as a catalyst.
em>Trescone:How do you utilize data to drive better outcomes at the lowest cost?
Powell:Healthcare delivery is regional, almost down to the zip code, so there is a wide range in the opportunity to achieve savings. We have seen costs from $4,500 per death to $45,000 per death and it really depends upon the attitudes toward health that a region might have about how they access and utilize healthcare.
What our solution has been built to do is to know where a patient is on his or her healthcare journey, what familial support they have, what community they have and what parts of the provider community make up access and utilization potential for them. We apply logic that helps the care provider, without bias, understand what the likely best clinical outcome is and what healthcare utilization is recommended to achieve that outcome.
Trescone: You’ve built this system on AI and machine learning?
Powell:Though the principles of AI and Machine learning are over 5 decades old, AI and Machine Learning, as applied to healthcare needs, are early sciences, and there are incredible outcomes ahead of us. I can click a consultation button to see what the typical outcomes are for patients of the same age, gender, ethnicity, and with the same conditions in my instance of the data around my market. I can open the lens and look at patients across the region or nation. And I can look at the total benchmarking population against the Acclivity book of business, which today is over 1.5 million patient lives. What is presented is a pie chart that shows some portion of the population lived beyond 3 years, some less than 12 months, some less than 6 months, and some less than 3 months and some less than 1 month. That information is helpful. To make it complete, we need to apply our machine learning outputs.
The machine learning model we have developed predicts prognosis to 3-month intervals at greater than 90% accuracy.
Trescone: So, you are teaching the providers to trust and work with machine learning gradually?
Powell:We think you must. We are of the opinion, having grown up on the acute side dealing with very complex patient scenarios, that the closer you can get to the tip of the sphere where providers make clinical decisions the better the outcomes are. It’s about evolving with them as they evolve their own thinking and their practice.
We will strive to achieve 100% accuracy in predicting prognosis through data or machine learning. We know that there will always be outliers that beat prognosis models and miraculous journeys that occur.
Trescone: What is your vision for hospice?
Powell: We made an early decision in our business to tie ourselves to hospice because that healthcare sector specifically has built incredible infrastructure around telephonic support, an interdisciplinary approach using nursing, chaplaincy, social work, and allied health staff that can align to whatever (and whenever) a patient has as a need. Benefits focused on the spiritual, physical, emotional, and psychosocial needs of a patient will become medicine at large, and it is a mechanism to drive out high facility costs associated with many parts of today’s healthcare system.
We believe hospice will become a hub for the way that care gets delivered and their services will continue to expand. Palliative medicine is already a focus, and we think that hospice will continue to provide more services in the home and evolve to offer a larger variety of patients access to service. Other care entities will become the spokes of the wheel as hospice works with keeping complex patients independent as long as possible, allowing them to age in place.
To date, there are services that an organization with the infrastructure of a hospice and palliative business could bill for that would pay for much of this innovation. With existing staff in hospice there are services that could be provided, including chronic care management, transitions of care, behavioral interventions, and advance care planning, to name a few, which net about $500-$600 per month per patient.
Our world view is that hospice is the hub. The spokes around that hub include primary care, ACOs, and health plans that receive tremendous value from aligning into these “Connected Communities.” All the organizations participating provide data to truly collaborate, and that collaboration leads to significant, incremental revenue. In our work to date, a single provider on the platform can net about a million dollars of incremental revenue per quarter as a result. When that starts to occur, the providers start figuring out new ways to collaborate to deliver the best medicine for their markets in our connected communities.
About Acclivity Health Solutions
Acclivity Health Solutions provides the platform for connected care communities focused on patients with advanced illness. Using the Acclivity platform, healthcare providers are able to securely connect and collaborate with various disciplines in the care team to provide appropriate and timely services to their shared patient population while meeting the requirements of value-based care. For more information, please visit www.acclivityhealth.com.
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
By Tim Rowan, Editor & Publisher of Home Care Technology Report
Bob Roth recently celebrated 25 years of working with Cypress Home Care Solutions serving the people of Phoenix and surrounding communities. Will there be another 25 years for the former Gatorade product marketing manager for Quaker Oats and, for 16 years, the managing partner of one of the most respected family-owned private duty agencies in Arizona? [Rowan sketches an impressive biography of Roth’s accomplishments, and indicates that a positive response about Roth’s future in Arizona is in the offing. Noting how many home healthcare agencies there are today, he stresses that: “It all depends on whether we can continue to find qualified and willing workers to care for our people as they age and as the demand grows in proportion with the demographics.” He cites boominxg numbers of elderly individuals needing care between 2020 and 2050, and notes an innovative way that his company, Cypress Home Care Solutions, is attempting to stave off the healthcare service shortage for elderly Americans. In brief, he describes how “Cypress opened its caregiver training sessions to family caregivers, at no charge.”[More educational focuses are noted, many of which continue the program over the years. He continues by describing the Honor Care Network and its innovative recruiting program. He contacted its president, Nita Sommers, flew her to Phoenix, and then describes buying into the program. Here’s one selling point that Roth wants to relay:
“Caregivers often quit when they are not given enough shifts and go seeking additional work with another agency out of necessity,” Sommers has said, “which only fuels the shortage. By working together with local agencies in the Honor Care Network, we can help alleviate the workforce shortage by providing increased access to as well as more consistent work for professional caregivers.”
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
Admin., “Plum Healthcare and Netsmart Partner to Innovate Technology to Enhance Integrated Care in Senior Living,”
OVERLAND PARK, Kan., April 24, 2019—Plum Healthcare (Plum), a leading senior living provider, has joined with healthcare IT company Netsmart in a 10-year strategic partnership to innovate technology solutions and services to enhance care delivery. This joint innovation-based partnership between a technology partner and a senior living provider will be a key component to support Plum as it expands into new service lines and offerings across more than 50 facilities throughout California and Nevada.[This new partnership between a leading senior living provider and leading technology experts is expected to leverage the team’s “collective knowledge to develop appropriate solutions and services to support integrated healthcare.” This approach, along with Plum’s widespread experience in skilled nursing and home health care, supports their plans to create and manage an accountable care organization (ACO) to deliver comprehensive, coordinated care within their communities.””[One key and specific expectation of this partnership is: The partnership and use of Netsmart solutions strongly position Plum to strengthen their status as a well-respected, high-volume provider. In addition to a co-development method to technology, Plum will utilize a Netsmart electronic health record (EHR) solution, myUnity, that combines all patient information within a single patient record across care settings along with an exhaustive data and analytics tool, gaining instant access to vital health information and actionable reports.”]
[Extensive background is provided about the focuses and reach of Plum Healthcare and Netsmart’s design of electronic health records (EHRs) primarily for senior living residents.]
2) Casamba Partners with Forcura for Document Workflow Solution
Admin. Agoura Hills, CA – April 18, 2019 – Casamba, a provider of electronic medical record (EMR) solutions for home health agencies, outpatient therapy, skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and contract therapy providers, today announced Forcura has signed on to join the company’s partner network.
Through this partnership, the Jacksonville-based Forcura Document Workflow Solution to Casamba’s Home & Hospice customers..[And, for customers using this service, this partnership translates into streamlined plans of care, physician orders, CMS 485s and other documentation – keeping costs down, ensuring compliance and speeding up reimbursements.
“With Forcura, Casamba Home & Hospice clients will be receiving document workflow capabilities that will help them thrive in today’s increasingly digitized healthcare landscape,” said Luis Montes, Casamba’s SVP of Strategic Partnerships. “Forcura offers an intuitive solution that delivers efficiency for home health agencies of any size.”
[The impressive size and company history of Casamba are noted in this article, as is Forcura’s size and expected contributions to the network.]
casamba.net/partner-network
forcura.com
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
By Admin
The Immersus Health Company LLC, founded 7 years ago by Brian Pavlin, provides US designed and manufactured, evidence-based support surface and seating systems to hospice organizations and patients in their care.[Details are provided about the company’s owner, Brian Pavlin, and his quest to develop hospice patient-appropriate mattresses and seating products and earn clinically proven status with all of them. He founded The Immersus Health Company to set the standard with clinically proven products designed specifically for hospice patients. According to the authors, it is believed that today “Immersus is the only US mattress and seating company who has products specifically designed for Hospice patients, and that have a true, multi-patient clinical outcome study. Patients were more comfortable, compliant and experienced less pain…all in all, the end of life experience was enhanced by the use of the Immersus and Posture-Mate products.”]
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
By Tim Rowan, Editor & Publisher of Home Care Technology Report
David Schiller served for 30 years as a Special Agent in Charge with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). [Rowan reports on Schiller’s longstanding role in working to curb this country’s corrupt pharmacies that supplied highly addictive painkillers sent to drugstores from Sacramento, California to Lakeland, Fla. Furthermore, as Rowan notes: these drug operations involved “millions of highly addictive painkillers sent to drugstores, as noted, from Sacramento, CA to Lakeland, FL, and according to the Washington Post, “The team, based out of the DEA’s Denver field division, had been examining the operations of the nation’s largest drug company, McKesson Corp. By 2014, investigators said they could show that the company had failed to report suspicious orders involving millions of highly addictive painkillers sent to drugstores from Sacramento, California to Lakeland, Fla. Some of those [funds] went to corrupt pharmacies that supplied drug rings.”
To Schiller’s chagrin, McKesson and government lawyers reached a settlement agreement that left the drug company’s operations intact. He had expected his efforts would have resulted in the company being decertified as a distributor. “It was insulting,” Schiller said at the time. “Morale [at the DEA] has been broken because of it.”
Schiller came to Las Vegas [to a recent home care conference titled “Telehealth 2019”] to deliver an important — some might say life or death — message to hospices and their clinicians. When a person dies under their care, residential hospices are now authorized to dispose of leftover controlled substances (see references in footnote one about the 9/9/14 DEA final rule and in footnote two regarding the 2/22/19 EPA ruling). In-home hospice service providers are “encouraged” to do the same. This is the result of a bill that was signed into law on October 24, 2018 after its three-year journey through Congress. The pertinent section of the 600-page law known as HR6, section 3222, was written by NAHC President Bill Dombi.
[It’s noted at length that these highly addictive and illegal drugs cannot be disposed of in the sewer systems since they will contaminate the cities’ water systems. In addition. it’s noted:
“transporting opioids to EPA incineration centers is both expensive and potentially vulnerable to hijacking while in transit. Some hospices may have been doing the right thing, carefully disposing of morphine, oxycontin, and other opioids before, but they were not permitted to do so, nor did they have access to proper methods. ”
Schiller had several messages for in-home care providers at the Telehealth 2019 conference, put on by Connected Home Living:
Not only hospice but home health and home care also need to learn their roles and responsibilities under HR6.
The death of a hospice patient is not they only time controlled substances may need to be destroyed.
Often, post-surgical or other patients stop needing their pain medications before the last pill is taken, or perhaps a bad reaction to one medication leads to a doctor providing an alternative, which leaves the nearly-full original drug sitting in a medicine cabinet, often for years.
For these reasons, possibly 90 percent of U.S. households have controlled substances tucked away on a shelf somewhere.
Addicts have learned a number of ways to get at these leftover pharmaceuticals. Some make a practice of attending open houses put on by realtors. They search bathroom medicine chests and steal whatever they find there, for personal use or for sale.
The ideal disposal method is to “drown” dangerous pharmaceuticals in a solution that neutralizes them and makes it impossible for addicts to reconstitute them. This is what brought David Schiller to a healthcare conference. He was introducing hospice and other providers to “NarcX™, a chemical solution that meets both needs and induces vomiting in anyone who attempts to consume the pills by consuming the solution.
NarcX is available in a container as small as a soda can and as large as 55-gallon drums, with up to 330 gallon containers available for industrial destruction centers. A hospice nurse attending the passing of a patient can drop hundreds of leftover pills into the smaller container. She can safely transport it from one home to the next, for months if necessary, until it has reached its capacity.
Diverting controlled substances is defined as transferring them from the one to whom they were prescribed to someone else. Pills deposited in a NarcX solution are immediately rendered non-divertable. Within moments, never longer than two hours, they also become completely non-retrievable — defined as showing 0.00% detectable opioid content. Pills can be added to a single container for six to twelve months before it is recommended that the canister be disposed. A full container remains environmentally safe and can be discarded with normal home or office trash.
“Our disposal method is safer than transporting dangerous controlled substances to incineration facilities, and it saves hospices thousands and hospitals millions of dollars annually,” he told us. “Plus, the solution is all natural, which means it is environmentally friendly when discarded.” NarcX, he added, is the only DEA/CFR-compliant liquid solution disposal method.
Pricing for all sizes of NarcX containers and a list of frequently asked questions are available on the company web site. narcx.com
___________________________________________________________
1 Disposal of Controlled Substances: https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/fed_regs/rules/2014/2014-20926.pdf
21 CFR Parts 1300, 1301, 1304, 1305, 1307, and 1317 [Docket No. DEA–316] RIN 1117–AB18 Disposal of Controlled Substances
Federal Register 9/9/14
“If a person dies while lawfully in possession of a controlled substance for personal use, any person lawfully entitled to dispose of the decedent’s property may deliver the controlled substance to another person for the purpose of disposal under the same conditions as provided for ultimate users.” This rule provides a number of options for ultimate users and persons lawfully entitled to dispose of a deceased ultimate user’s property to safely and securely dispose of pharmaceutical controlled substances, yet the DEA does not require ultimate users to utilize these options. However, it is unlawful for ultimate users to transfer pharmaceutical controlled substances to unauthorized persons, and it is unlawful for unauthorized persons to receive such substances. It is also unlawful for any person to possess a controlled substance unless authorized to do so under the CSA (i.e., an ultimate user, an entity registered with the DEA, or an entity exempt from registration with the DEA). 21 U.S.C. 844(a). Home hospice and other homecare providers are encouraged to assist their patients, and their patients’ families, in disposing of pharmaceutical controlled substances in accordance with the CSA and its implementing regulations. While education is paramount, home healthcare agencies are also encouraged to partner with authorized collectors to promote or jointly conduct mail-back programs.
2 Management Standards for Hazardous Waste Pharmaceuticals: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/02/22/2019-01298/management-standards-for-hazardous-waste-pharmaceuticals-and-amendment-to-the-p075-listing-for
©2019 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com
By Elizabeth Hogue, Esq.
Simply Home Health Care, a home health agency in Illinois, is suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and AdvanceMed, a UPIC, for continued suspension of payments from the Medicare Program in Simply Home Healthcare, LLC . Azar et al, Case No. 1:19cv-02313, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.[Details are provided about the class action lawsuit filed by Simply Home Health Care in the U.S. District Court are
Simply Home Health Care filed a class action lawsuit in the UU Payments to the Agency were originally suspended because of an overpayment. The Agency was later told by AdvanceMed that payments were suspended because of suspected fraud. The Agency says that AdvanceMed cannot support its claims of fraudulent conduct.
The suspension of payments from the Medicare Program was ultimately reversed many months later. According to AdvanceMed, however, the Agency owed the Medicare Program $5.4 million. The amount due to the Medicare Program was later reduced to $4.8 million. Based on the alleged overpayment, Simply Home Health Care was forced to go out of business in 2017.
The Agency claims that AdvanceMed did not correctly apply federal statutes and regulations. Simply Home Health Care also claims that AdvanceMed had incentives to do so in order to win additional contracts from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The Agency also claims in its suit that many other agencies have experienced the same fate as it did and deserve to be compensated for their losses, too. The Agency, therefore, filed a class action on behalf of both itself and these other agencies.
This case is another “chapter” in the continuing saga of providers v. UPICs and ZPICs. So far, the results of these efforts have been mixed. In some instances, providers have been able to obtain temporary restraining orders from sympathetic judges that prevented recoupments until after hearings by Administrative Law Judges. The courts in Texas, for example, have been especially receptive to providers’ requests for assistance with huge overpayments. In other similar instances, however, Courts have been unwilling to provide any assistance to providers even though providers continue to go out of business because of extrapolated overpayments and their inability to financially withstand massive recoupments.
Faced with the loss of their businesses, providers must, of course, continue to seek assistance from the Courts. The stakes are high! Consequently, providers must continue to “knock at the door” seeking relief from devastating actions by UPICs and ZPICs.
©2019 Elizabeth E. Hogue, Esq. All rights reserved. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any form without the advance written permission of the author. This article originally appeared by permission in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com
Update to Public Reporting of the Hospice Visits When Death is Imminent Measure Pair
The “Hospice Visits when Death is Imminent” measure pair assesses whether a hospice patient’s and caregiver’s needs were addressed by hospice staff in the last three and seven days of life. The three-day “Hospice Visits when Death is Imminent” measure will be publicly reported on Hospice Compare in summer 2019, as planned.
[It’s noted that this 7-day hospice visit measure “will not be publicly reported at this time because it did not currently meet readiness standards for public reporting. Additional time will allow further testing to determine if changes to this measure or how it would be displayed on Hospice Compare are needed, and to ensure the measure’s accuracy and reliability as an indicator of provider quality.”
For more information please see the “Public Reporting of the Hospice Visits when Death is Imminent Measure Pair Fact Sheet” in the Downloads section of the Public Reporting: Background and Announcements webpage.
CMS: “Beyond the Policy” [podcast, with highlights from the 2019 CMS Quality conference]
Today [April 3, 2018)], the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is releasing the latest episode of our podcast, CMS: Beyond the Policy. This episode brings highlights from the 2019 CMS Quality Conference. An annual event attracting over 3,000 participants this year had a strong focus on reducing clinician burden so that they can focus on patients, promote health care choice and drive value-based care. See CMS Administrator Seema Verma’s keynote speech in which she discussed the vision for Medicare and CMS this year as well as audience reaction. It is hoped that readers will enjoy this condensed version of the conference knowing that it’s not always possible to attend in person. This HCTR audience can listen to the podcast here as well as on Google Play and iTunes.
