Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Proposed rule will allow docs to focus more time on patients.

If you're a physician who feels she's spending too much time worrying about her compliance with Medicare's hospital conditions of participation (CoPs), good news may be coming down the pike.

Medicare published a proposed rule on March 24 that revised CoP requirements to provide docs with "greater flexibility in meeting the needs of patients and to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden," according to a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services press release.

The proposed changes are:
  Expand the history and physical (H&P) completion time frame and the number of practitioners allowed to perform the H&P.
  Verbal orders can be dated, timed and authenticated by the prescribing practitioner or another practitioner responsible for the patient's care, but only for five years after the rule's publication date. After that time, CMS believes physicians will be able to adopt new technology to make timely prescription authentication easier. Unless a physician's state has a law for the time frame of verbal order authentication, the proposed rule will require it within 48 hours.
  Doctors must keep all drugs and "biologicals" in a  secure or locked area, but the proposed rule does allow a doctor to determine how much security he needs for drugs in his facility.
  Although the current CoP requires the practitioner who administered anesthesia to perform the post-anesthesia evaluation, the proposed rule would allow any person qualified to deliver anesthesia to complete the evaluation.

Lesson learned: Medicare's proposed changes are intended to support modern, high-quality health care at a lower cost by lightening physicians' CoP loads.