Dive Brief:
- Stakeholders collaborating under the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) have released a set of six recommended steps to improve U.S. healthcare, ranging from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reforms, updates to fraud and abuse laws, and increased efforts toward a nationwide health information system.
- Those involved suggest the reforms are capable of achieving bipartisan support, even given that it's an election year fraught with partisan politics.
- To develop the recommendations, HLC’s National Dialogue for Healthcare Innovation brought together senior leaders from all healthcare sectors and engaged patient groups and key industry voices, the group says, and produced the final report in collboration with policy research organization National Opinion Research Center.
Dive Insight:
The group describes its recommendations as common-sense solutions that can help make the U.S. healthcare system more patient-centered and effective. “These steps aren’t revolutionary, but they are transformative,” HLC president Mary R. Grealy said in a prepared statement.
The recommendations include:
- Sett a deadline of December 31, 2018, for achieving interoperability between healthcare organizations for data sharing;
- Improve the efficacy of the FDA by reducing the agency's administrative burdens and speeding the review of innovative treatments and technologies;
- Implement best practices across the industry to improve care for chronically ill patients;
- Reform outdated physician self-referral and anti-kickback statutes and expanding Medicare payment waiver policies, to improve care coordination and protection against fraud and abuse;
- Standardize state and federal privacy laws and improving access to data for research; and
- Improve CMS' Enhanced Medication Therapy Management Model to help the program follow through on improving patients’ health
The HLC reports it has already started discussing the recommendations with congressional leaders.