Regulatory/Legislative News

The big day came at the beginning of this month: the long-awaited and much-feared start of the mandated conversion from the beloved and revered ICD-9 to the complex and onerous ICD-10.

The National Health Services Corps and NURSE Corps scholarship and loan repayment programs will receive more than $240 million in funding from HHS, according to a press release.

HHS has issued new rules to the Electronic Heath Record Incentive Program and the Health IT Certification Program that will make EHR information more available to patients, simplify information sharing and ease the burden on health care providers, according to a press release.

Ophthalmologists are struggling to meet attestation requirements of the Meaningful Use program for electronic health record adoption, the American Academy of Ophthalmology informed the CMS.

This summer, Congress passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. (MACRA). The president signed this into law on April 14.

On Oct. 1, the U.S. health care system will begin to use the International Classification of Diseases 10th edition ─ it replaces the decades-old 9th edition. This represents the largest change in coding since the revision of evaluation and management CPT codes in 1992.

The Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security met on Thursday, September 17 for a hearing on the implementation of biosimilar agents with Janet Woodcock, MD, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA, and among other questions about interchangeability and safety, some senators questioned the lack of action in the issuance of guidance documents.

A modest reduction in the use of low-value services was seen among health care practices that participated in Medicare’s Pioneer ACO program, according to recently published data in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery have released a joint paper outlining their positions on transferring care and comanagement.

The NIH’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network has launched a new online patient application portal that will allow patients who suffer from conditions that specialists have been unsuccessful at diagnosing to apply to all the program’s participating clinical sites, rather than applying to sites one-by-one.