Administration Updates
White House: FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Takes Action to Promote Access to Behavioral Health Care for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Communities (7/26) – The Biden administration hosted its inaugural mental health summit focused on improving equity and access to behavioral health care for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities.
CMS: Fiscal Year 2024 Medicare Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Prospective Payment System and Quality Reporting Final Rule (7/27) – CMS finalized its FY 2024 payment update for inpatient psychiatric facilities, which notable includes three measures focused on health equity for the quality reporting program.
CMS: Fiscal Year 2024 Hospice Payment Rate Update Final Rule (7/28) – CMS finalized its FY 2024 payment update for hospice programs, which seeks to examine health equity under the hospice benefit and updates health equity quality measures.
CMS: Building on CMS’s Accountable Care Vision to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries
(7/31) – CMS authors penned this article published in Health Affairs describing progress to date in the CMS accountable care strategy and outlining areas that CMS is exploring to grow the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), increase alignment between MSSP and ACO models, and advance health equity.
CMS: Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) Model (7/31) – CMS announced a new voluntary nationwide model, which aims to support people living with dementia and their unpaid caregivers. The model would also require participants to screen beneficiaries for psychosocial needs and health-related social needs and help navigate them to local CBOs to address such needs.
ONC: Hospitals Collect and Receive Social Needs Data, but Usage Varies
(7/31) – HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT posted a blog analyzing data from the 2022 American Hospital Association Information Technology Supplement Survey, finding that 83 percent of non-federal acute care hospitals collected data on patients health-related social needs, 60 percent received data from outside sources, and many reported using the data they collected internally and received from outside sources for various purposes.
HHS: HHS Awards $2.5 Million to Help Decrease Food Insecurity in Native Communities
(7/31) – HHS, through the Indian Health Service, awarded $2.5 million in funding to support the development of produce prescription programs in tribal communities in order to help reduce food insecurity and improve health care outcomes among American Indian and Alaska Native people.
HUD: HUD Issues Invitation for Public Housing Agencies to Join Moving to Work Demonstration Program (7/31) – U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is requesting applications for the Overall Impact of Moving to Work Flexibility and Administrative Efficiencies of the Moving to Work Demonstration program, which provides public housing authorities the opportunity to try “outside the box” ideas that address local community needs in innovative ways.
CMS: Fiscal Year 2024 Inpatient Prospective Payment System Final Rule
(8/2) – In its final FY24 inpatient prospective payment system rule, CMS finalized several policies focused on health equity, including a health equity adjustment in the scoring methodology for the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program and a policy to recognize the higher costs that hospitals incur when treating people experiencing homelessness when hospitals report SDOH codes on claims.
|