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 |
|---|---|---|
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (A)The Secretary should establish patient safety as a quality improvement priority for Medicare and should take steps to minimize the incidence of preventable errors in the delivery of care provided to beneficiaries. |
|
June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (B)The Secretary should support and make use of ongoing public and private error-reduction initiatives- including those that promote incident reporting by providers, analysis of root causes and patterns in occurrence, and dissemination of information designed to prevent recurrence- through Medicare’s policies and quality improvement activities. |
|
June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (C)The Congress should enact legislation to protect the confidentiality of individually identifiable information relating to errors in health care delivery when that information is reported for quality improvement purposes. |
|
June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (D)The Secretary should consider opportunities for minimizing avoidable errors in health care delivery through coverage and payment policies, quality measurement initiatives, and quality improvement programs |
|
June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (E)The Secretary should work with providers and other stakeholders to identify and promote effective and efficient processes, structures, and activities for reducing preventable errors and to set progressive targets for improvement in patient safety through Medicare’s quality improvement programs. |
|
June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (F)The Secretary should not establish requirements that specify maximum tolerance rates of errors in health care delivery under Medicare’s conditions of participation for health care providers. |
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June 1999 |
Addressing health care errors under Medicare (G)The Secretary should fund research to study appropriate use of autopsies and to evaluate approaches for using information derived from autopsies in health care quality improvement and error-reduction initiatives. |
|
June 1999 |
Improving care at the end of life (A)Make end-of-life care a national quality improvement priority for Medicare+Choice and traditional Medicare. |
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June 1999 |
Improving care at the end of life (B)Support research on care at the end of life, and work with nongovernmental organizations as they (1) educate the health care profession and the public about care at the end of life, and (2) develop measures to accredit health care organizations and provide public accountability for the quality of end-of-life care. |
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June 1999 |
Improving care at the end of life (C)Sponsor projects to develop and test measures of the quality of end-of-life care for Medicare beneficiaries, and enlist quality improvement organizations and Medicare+Choice plans to implement quality improvement programs for care at the end of life. |
|
June 1999 |