The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMMI) announced new flexibilities and adjustments to its current and future alternative payment models in response to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE).
Of note for the cancer community, CMMI made the following changes to the Oncology Care Model:
- Payment Methodology
- Option for OCM practices to elect to forgo upside and downside risk for performance periods affected by the PHE
- For OCM practices that remain in one- or two-sided risk for the performance periods affected by the PHE, remove COVID-19 episodes from reconciliation for those performance periods
- Quality Reporting
- Make the following optional for the affected performance periods:
- Aggregate-level reporting of quality measures
- Beneficiary-level reporting of clinical and staging data
- Remove the requirement for cost and resource utilization reporting and practice transformation plan reporting in July/August 2020
- Make the following optional for the affected performance periods:
- Timeline
- Extend model for 1 year through June 2022
Stay up to date on the latest cancer policy and practice news through ASCO in Action.