Situation Report | June 29, 2020
Last week, the U. S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics to “unify the agency’s efforts to reduce regulatory and administrative burden and to further the goal of putting patients first.”
The new office is an outgrowth of the agency’s Patients over Paperwork (PoP) Initiative.
“The new office will strengthen CMS’s efforts across Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Health Insurance Marketplace to decrease the hours and costs clinicians and providers incur for CMS-mandated compliance,” the announcement states. “It will take a proactive approach to reducing burden, carefully considering the impact of new regulations on health care system operations. The new office will also increase the number of clinicians, providers, and health plans the Agency engages, to ensure that CMS has a better understanding of how various regulatory burdens impact health care delivery.”
Additionally, the Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics will focus on the important work of health informatics, which uses and applies health data and clinical information to provide better health care to patients.