Physician Payment Sunshine Act: Council of Medical Specialty Societies Urges CMS To "Promptly Issue Revised Guidance" on CME Exemption FAQs and Website Q&As

Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued three FAQs and a page of website guidance to supplement their recent decision to remove the continuing medical education (CME) exemption from the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. Unfortunately this guidance adds significant confusion by contradicting CMS’s own rationale for their revision to the Final Rule. On January 15, 2015, the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) sent CMS a letter both explaining the Agency’s troublesome interpretation and also urging them to “promptly issue revised guidance.”
CMSS wrote to CMS on behalf of 41 medical specialty society members, with collective membership of over 750,000 healthcare professionals. Their letter points out that the language CMS used to justify removing the CME exemption “clearly stated that industry payments to support accredited CME would not be indirect transfers and thus would not be reportable if the applicable manufacturer later learned the identity of the physician speaker within the allotted timeframe.”
The website example question and answers, however, disregard this preamble language in the Final Rule.
As a background, if an applicable manufacturer “provides funding to support a continuing education event but does not require, instruct, direct, or otherwise cause the continuing education event provider to provide the payment or other transfer of value in whole or in part to a covered recipient,” the manufacturers are no...

Source: Policy and Medicine - January 21, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan Source Type: blogs