Commission Recommendations
MedPAC makes recommendations to the Congress and to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on issues affecting the administration of the Medicare program. With its recommendations, the Commission strives to improve the delivery of care, while ensuring financial stability and maximizing value for the program. After extensive analysis and evaluation, our recommendations are discussed and voted on by Commissioners in our public meetings. Recommendations are typically published in two main reports, released in March and June of each year.
| Recommendations | Topic(s) | Date |
|---|---|---|
Skilled nursing facility services (3)CMS should: * Develop and use more quality indicators specific to short-stay patients in skilled nursing facilities, * Put a high priority on developing appropriate quality measures for pay for performance, and * Collect information on activities of daily living at admission and discharge. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (A)The Congress should establish a quality incentive payment policy for hospitals in Medicare. |
|
March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (B)CMS should require hospitals to identify which secondary diagnoses were present on admission on their claims forms. |
|
March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (C)The Congress should establish a quality incentive payment policy for home health agencies in Medicare. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (D)The Secretary should develop a valid set of measures of home health adverse events, including adequate risk adjustment. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (E)The Congress should establish a quality incentive payment policy for physicians in Medicare. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (F)CMS should require those who perform laboratory tests to submit laboratory values, using common vocabulary standards. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (G)CMS should ensure that the prescription claims data from the Part D program are available for assessing the quality of pharmaceutical and physician care. |
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March 2005 |
Strategies to improve care: Pay for performance and information technology (H)The Congress should direct CMS to include measures of functions supported by the use of information technology in Medicare initiatives to financially reward providers on the basis of quality. |
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March 2005 |
Defining long-term care hospitals (A)The Congress and the Secretary should define long-term care hospitals by facility and patient criteria that ensure that patients admitted to these facilities are medically complex and have a good chance of improvement. * Facility-level criteria should characterize this level of care by features such as staffing, patient evaluation and review processes, and mix of… Read more » |
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June 2004 |