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Medicare to Divulge When a Doc's Patient Is in an ACO Modern Healthcare by Virgil Dickson — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is making a more concerted effort to make sure doctors know which patients they're responsible for in Medicare accountable care organizations (ACO). The CMS has updated the Medicare website to allow a beneficiary to list his or her primary-care doctor. If that doctor is in an ACO, the beneficiary would be assigned to both that provider and their ACO starting next year. There currently are 480 shared-savings Medicare ACOs serving over 9 million beneficiaries. "With the old methodology, the ACO and the physician did not have a real benchmark to measure their performance against," said Dr. Sanjay Seth, chief operating officer of HealthEC, a population health management company that works with ACOs to track patient care. "It was always a moving target." The new patient selection option on the Medicare website will help eliminate the uncertainty now faced by clinicians over how they'll be assessed by the CMS, Seth said.
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Health Care Organizations Ask CMS to Harmonize Electronic Health Records Requirements Modern Healthcare by Rachel Z. Arndt — Health care organizations praised the CMS for proposing greater flexibility in electronic health record requirements under the Merit-based Incentive Payment System track of MACRA and asked the agency to standardize EHR requirements across incentive programs. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the American Hospital Association, the American Health Information Management Association and others supported CMS' proposed 2018 performance year rule's change that would allow clinicians to continue to use 2014 edition certified EHRs for another year, potentially saving them the effort of updating and installing new software. Praising the CMS's "flexibility" in its new EHR requirements, they said in comments on the rule that the agency is appropriately easing the burden on providers at a time when there are few 2015 edition certified EHRs available.