On Tuesday, June 23, 2020, CMS announced the “creation of the Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics to unify the agency’s efforts to reduce regulatory and administrative burden and to further the goal of putting patients first. The new office is an outgrowth of the agency’s Patients over Paperwork (PoP) Initiative, which is the cornerstone of CMS’s ongoing efforts to implement President Trump’s 2017 executive order to “Cut the Red Tape” and eliminate duplicative, unnecessary, and excessively costly requirements and regulations. This announcement permanently embeds a culture of burden reduction across all platforms of CMS agency operations.

CMS’s burden reduction work began three years ago with the launch of our PoP Initiative, which has focused on reducing unnecessary regulatory burden, in order to allow providers to concentrate on their primary mission: patient care. The results are expected to save providers and clinicians $6.6 billion and 42 million unnecessary burden hours through 2021. As part of our efforts to date, CMS has heard from over 2,500 providers, clinicians, administrative staff, health care leaders, beneficiaries and their support teams through 158 site visits and listening sessions. Through more than 10 Requests for Information (RFI) combined with stakeholder interviews, CMS also has over 15,000 comments to assist us in our burden reduction efforts.

These efforts have yielded significant results:

• Removed unnecessary, obsolete, or excessively burdensome conditions of participation for hospitals and other healthcare providers saving an estimated 4.4 million hours of time previously spent on paperwork with an overall total projected savings to providers of $800 million annually.
• Removed 235 data elements from 33 items on the Outcomes and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) assessment instrument for home health.
• Established within the Quality Payment Program (QPP), a consolidated data submission experience for the different performance categories of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) so that clinicians no longer need to submit data in multiple systems.
• Eliminated 79 measures, through modernizing proposals to advance our Meaningful Measures Initiative, resulting in projected savings of $128 million and an anticipated reduction of 3.3 million burden hours through 2020.
• Implemented changes resulting in faster processing of state requests to make program or benefit changes to their respective Medicaid programs through the state plan amendment (SPA) and section 1915 waiver review process.

“The Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics will ensure the agency’s commitment to reduce administrative costs and enact meaningful and lasting change in our nation’s health care system,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Specifically, the work of this new office will be targeted to help reduce unnecessary burden, increase efficiencies, continue administrative simplification, increase the use of health informatics, and improve the beneficiary experience.”  The Press Release for this announcement can be viewed here.

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