On June 16, 2021, PEPC sent a letter to CMS encouraging the agency to reconsider recent CMS guidance around requirements for event notifications – also known as admission/discharge/transfer or ADT feeds – to community practitioners. These notifications are critical to improving patient safety through better care transitions and to enabling value-based care at scale.
PEPC is concerned that the recent guidance will not encourage already-reluctant hospitals to do more than simply check-the-box, thus limiting the significant impact that the new requirement could have in supporting the value-based care movement. While the guidance states that the event notification requirement does “not limit the hospital’s ability to notify additional entities based on hospital policy, such as ACO attribution lists,” it certainly does not encourage hospitals to accept them. This is problematic because value-based payment models – including those run by Medicare and Medicaid – almost universally utilizer rosters (i.e., attribution lists) and to allow hospitals to ignore those rosters will mean that the new regulations will not support these programs.
PEPC urged CMS to clearly and affirmatively state that hospitals should make every effort to accept patient rosters in the final guidance, and should be encouraged for the following reasons:
- Electronic Information Sharing is Key to Value-Based Care
- Greater Information Sharing Promotes Health Care Competition
- Roster-Based Approaches Can Be Accommodated by Hospitals Today With No New Technology
To read the full letter, click here.