April marks the 10-year anniversary of the start of the agreement period for the first Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (Shared Savings Program) – an ambitious program to reward health care providers for improving health care for people with Medicare. The program now includes 483 ACOs with over 525,000 participating clinicians serving more than 11 million Medicare beneficiaries.

Excerpt: Since its inception in 1965, Medicare has been leading the way in providing affordable, quality coverage and care, playing a key role in the health and financial security of more than 63 million Americans. As the largest single purchaser of health care—with one in every five health care dollars paid by the program—Medicare serves as a transformative force in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many shortcomings in our health care system, especially the ability to quickly share and use reliable data to better understand the health needs of all people across the country. This need for more accessible data is why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) remains committed to making health care data flow more freely and securely among payers, providers, and patients by laying the foundation to foster a more connected health care system.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is committed to ensuring people on Medicare have quicker access to innovative medical technologies for life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating diseases – like cancer and heart disease.

In January 2021, we published a final rule called The Medicare Coverage of Innovative Technology and Definition of ‘Reasonable and Necessary’ (MCIT/R&N). The rule would have granted expedited Medicare coverage for up to four years for any U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA)-designated breakthrough device once the device received or cleared market authorization. This is assuming the device was not excluded from coverage by the Medicare statute.

We’ve learned a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic on the ways access to comprehensive health care affects our lives and well-being. The availability of COVID-19 tests, vaccines, and treatments have saved millions of Americans from sickness and death  ̶  because the federal government stepped up to make sure that every person who needs COVID-related care has access to the care they need. But the challenge of the past 19 months has also put an incredible strain on our country’s health care infrastructure and highlighted weaknesses and disparities that cry out for smart and innovative solutions. 

Note: This blog was originally posted on HealthAffairs.org on August 12, 2021.

Excerpt: As incoming leaders at CMS under a new administration, we have taken stock of lessons learned from the first ten years of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s operation and begun to chart a path for the next ten years of value-based care.

On April 30, CMS announced the winner and runner-up of the CMS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge (“AI Challenge”), a prize competition for innovators to demonstrate how artificial intelligence tools can be used to accelerate the development of AI solutions that predict patient health events for Medicare beneficiaries for potential use by the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) in testing innovative payment and service delivery models.

All CMS.gov blog entries have been archived.

You can view previous blog entries by visiting the CMS.gov Blog Archive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a devastating toll on Americans across the country, whether in lives lost or economic impacts, and it has particularly affected our fellow citizens who have the most vulnerabilities, including the elderly and communities of color.  We’ve been forced to adjust and adapt our daily lives in innumerable ways, while significant public health resources have had to be redirected to help us meet and beat this unprecedented pandemic.

New Part D Policies Address Opioid Epidemic

Early last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published a roadmap outlining our efforts to address the national opioid epidemic.  The roadmap details our three-pronged approach, including prevention of new cases of opioid use disorder (OUD), expanding access to treatment for patients who have already developed OUD, and using data from across the country to better target our prevention and treatment activities.