Washington, D.C. – (September 11, 2023) – Today, AHIP submitted its comments on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Calendar Year (CY) 2024 Medicare Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment System (OPPS) Proposed Rule. Here are the highlights:
“Everyone deserves access to effective, affordable, and equitable mental health support and counseling. Health insurance providers, care professionals, and government agencies must work together to set high-quality standards and guidelines to ensure patients see measurable results.”
“AHIP is committed to working together to improve access to mental health and substance use disorder care for every patient who needs it.”
“While this new benefit is a step in the right direction, we believe more needs to be done to support patients with acute mental illness or substance use. We encourage CMS to better integrate behavioral health care into the Innovation Center’s alternative payment model (APM) demonstrations, which could further incentivize coordinated care and help address challenges such as social barriers and stigma.”
“We appreciate CMS’s ongoing partnership and commitment to the Core Quality Measure Collaborative, including its work on advancing digital measurement. We also support CMS’s commitment to leveraging measurement to improve health care quality, access, and equity. Health information technology and digital quality measurement offer ways to assess novel concepts, drive change, and reduce burden on all stakeholders.”
“We also support CMS’s goal of ensuring the use of artificial intelligence is safe and ethical. If used responsibly, [artificial intelligence] AI has the potential to improve health care affordability, access, and outcomes. However, we question whether provider performance programs are the right place to monitor the use of AI as these programs should be focused on evidence-based processes and patient outcomes.”