What Matters in Medtech Now?

With a new administration comes a new direction. That begs the question—with changes at federal agencies and proposed tax reform, is the medtech industry seeing a shift in priorities? Any Adjustments for Value-Based Care? After years of championing value-based care, CMS now plans to pull back on its bundled payment experiments. It issued a proposed rule in August that would allow many hospitals to take part voluntarily in its Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) program, instead of being required to participate. That program was initially the first of its kind in making participation in the bundled payment model mandatory for certain hospitals. It was being expanded from joint replacement to include hip and femur fractures as well as cardiac rehabilitation, acute myocardial infarction, and coronary artery bypass graft episodes of care. The CMS proposal would call off that expansion too. Amy Bassano, acting deputy administrator for Innovation and Quality and acting director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation at CMS, said it is too early to determine how hospitals are reacting to the proposed rule. When asked during a CMS Town Hall session at The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed whether hospitals were withdrawing from the CJR program, Bassano said, “It’s too early to tell. We’re still in rulemaking on that . . . [there’s] more to come on that.” She noted that CMS hopes to publish a final rule by the end of 2017. Despite the CMS pullbac...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Medical Device Business Source Type: news