Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

CMS unveils new steps to "improve" training.

While you're making way for the barrage of policy modifications due this fall, remember to add graduate medical education payments to your list.
     
Adjustments in the upcoming final rule will help ensure that CMS is providing "appropriate payments in the increasingly diverse settings in which medical training occurs," says Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mark McClellan.
     
McClellan also said that training will be better targeted to the areas where doctors are most needed.
     
What does that mean for you? According to an Aug. 9 release, CMS will:
     
redistribute unused residency slots among teaching hospitals to better reflect changes in the location of residency training, with rural hospitals given first priority;
     
allow a hospital to receive full payment for up to four years of specialty training when a resident matches simultaneously to a generalized, preliminary year of training and a subsequent specialty training program; and

  modify the written agreement requirement with non-hospital sites when counting the time a resident spends there. Hospitals can instead satisfy the requirement by paying the non-hospital training costs by the end of the third month following a month in which the training in the non-hospital setting occurred.
     
The rule is scheduled for release in the Aug. 11 Federal Register.
 
Lesson Learned: Expect some fine-tuning to provisions governing graduate medical education payments.