Staff Contact: Daniel Landon or Andrew Wheeler

MHA published and submitted comments for the calendar year 2022 Medicare physician fee schedule payment and policy updates. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will accept comments until 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 13.

Staff Contact: Leslie Porth or Daniel Landon

Late yesterday afternoon, the White House released a COVID-19 response plan, “Path Out of the Pandemic: President Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan,” detailing the next steps for the nation in the fight against the pandemic. The following are highlights of this diverse plan.

• • increasing vaccinations through mandated vaccination of federal employees and requiring private employers of more than 100 employees to be vaccinated or face weekly testing to be reported to the U.S. Department of Labor and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • protecting those who already are vaccinated through booster and third doses of the vaccine following U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CDC approval
  • keeping children safe by encouraging vaccination for those ages 12 and older, ongoing studies of COVID-19 vaccines in children ages two to 12 years of age, and calling on governors to force all teachers and administrators to be vaccinated
  • increasing testing and masking by expanding the use of the Defense Production Act to increase production of COVID-19 ‘rapid’ tests and increasing the affordability of at-home testing kits
  • protecting our nation’s economic recovery through increasing small business loans from a maximum of $500,000 to $2 million under the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program to mitigate losses due to COVID-19
  • improving the care for those who get sick using surge response teams with the use of military health teams, and increasing the average weekly pace of shipments of low- or no-cost monoclonal antibody treatments by as much as 50% beginning next week

Staff Contact: Andrew Wheeler

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Health Resources and Services Administration, announced that $25.5 billion in new relief funding is being made available for health care providers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the total, $8.5 billion will be available for providers who serve rural Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicare patients as prescribed by the American Rescue Plan Act. An additional $17 billion will be paid as Provider Relief Fund Phase 4 payments to a broad range of providers who can document revenue loss and expenses associated with the pandemic. Phase 4 payments will be based on providers’ lost revenues and expenditures between July 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021.

HHS also announced a 60-day grace period “to help providers come into compliance with their PRF reporting requirements.” Although the Thursday, Sept. 30, deadline is not changing, HHS states that it will not initiate collection activities or similar enforcement actions for noncompliant providers during the grace period.

Staff Contact: Andrew Wheeler

MHA released a summary and analysis of the federal fiscal year 2022 Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System final payment and policy updates. The analysis includes the financial effects of market basket updates, the budget neutrality adjustment, reductions mandated by the Affordable Care Act, Medicare disproportionate share changes, quality-based payment adjustments and coding adjustments. Results are illustrated in national, Missouri, health system and individual hospital groupings. Inpatient PPS hospitals in Missouri are projected to receive an estimated 2% increase in Medicare payments. Although footnoted, the effects of the Medicare sequestration are not included. Policy and analytic studies, prepared for distribution by the Hospital Industry Data Institute, are available for download to authorized users of HIDI Analytic Advantage.

Staff Contact: Dana Dahl

The Rural Health Information Hub updated its Critical Access Hospital Topic Guide FAQs to include information on 340B eligibility and the Rural Emergency Hospital designation.

Staff Contact: Andrew Wheeler

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued updates to MLN Connects Provider eNews. eNews includes information about national provider calls, meetings, events, announcements and other MLN educational product updates. The latest issue provides updates and summaries of the following.

• • Outpatient clinic visit services at excepted off-campus provider-based departments: payment update
  • Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Reports for short-term acute care hospitals
  • Medicare fee-for-service response to COVID-19 – revised article
  • Medicare mental health – revised publication

Staff Contact: Shawn Billings

In a recent HEALing Communities Study conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, data reveal a 38% increase in the rate of opioid overdose deaths from 2018 to 2019 for Non-Hispanic Black individuals. Fatal overdoses amongst Black people continue to increase, while the rates for other race and ethnicity groups held steady or decreased.

Fatal overdoses amongst Black individuals are driven largely by heroin and illicit fentanyl use. The study authors note that these data add to the evidence of increasing disparities in opioid overdose deaths by race and ethnicity, and highlight the importance of access to timely, local data to inform effective community-tailored strategies to reduce these deaths.

Staff Contact: Sherry Buschjost

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the availability of two updated Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Quality Reporting Program paper tools for data to be submitted in the summer of 2022. The paper tools provide an optional, informal abstraction mechanism to assist inpatient psychiatric facilities in the collection of data for the IPFQR Program.

• • Appendix for the Non-Measure Data Collection Tool in Microsoft Excel format
  • Guidelines for the Reason for IPF Admission element of the Transition Record with Specified Elements Received by Discharged Patients measure

These resources are available on the IPFQR Program Resources and Tools web page of the Quality Reporting Center.