Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

With consumers utilizing search engines more and more to find a clinician that provides the care and services they need, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to know how you feel about the creation of a national registry.

Details: On Oct. 7, CMS put out a Request for Information (RFI) asking the public to weigh in on a “National Directory of Healthcare Providers & Services (NDH) that could serve as a ‘centralized data hub’ for healthcare provider, facility, and entity directory information nationwide,” said a notice published in the Federal Register.

Why? A 2020 consumer report pointed out that the majority of patients use online tools and directories to find their providers; however, current hubs are all over the place and count on clinicians to do the updating, CMS said. “Directories often contain inaccurate information, rarely support interoperable data exchange or public health reporting, and are overall costly to the healthcare industry,” the agency added.

In its ongoing efforts to cut providers’ administrative burdens while boosting patients’ access to information and healthcare, CMS suggests that an NDH would offer the following advantages:

• Streamline and compile data for consumption;
• Reduce technical constraints by aggregating data and offering different database information in one place;
• Offer a user-friendly format for providers and consumers to access data;
• Align data exchange standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) with the current demands of HL7^® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®); and
• Cut down on inefficient, inconsistent, and duplicate data.

CMS is accepting formal comments on the notice through Dec. 6 at www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/07/2022- 21904/request-for-information-national-directory-of-healthcare-providers-and-services#open-comment.