WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 4, 2016) – The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) today issued the following statement with regard to the recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to implement key provisions of the bipartisan Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA):
“NATE is pleased to see that CMS is poised to reward providers for increasing their options for achieving electronic communication with their patients. The proposed MACRA Advancing Care Information (ACI) performance category’s base score determination not only requires that providers demonstrate that they can share information with their patients through secure messaging, it also requires providers to allow patients to access their own information using any consumer-facing application (CFA) of their choice through an API. Giving patients multiple methods to communicate with their providers will go a long way in making the patient an equal member of their care team.
NATE is especially excited by the proposal to award extra performance points to providers who demonstrate more than a minimal commitment to patient access to data, patient engagement and health information exchange. The proposed ACI value-added performance score places the emphasis right where it should be: using health IT to improve communication between providers and patients. CMS correctly recognizes that providers who make more of an effort to communicate with their patients should be rewarded for their actions.
Finally, NATE supports the proposal to include Advancing Care Information scores on the Physician Compare website, both positive and negative. Consumers would benefit from seeing exactly how well their providers demonstrate their meaningful use of health IT.”
# # #
About National Association for Trusted Exchange
The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) is a not-for-profit membership association focused on enabling trusted exchange among organizations and individuals with differing regulatory environments and exchange preferences. NATE brings the expertise of its membership and other stakeholders together to find common solutions that optimize the appropriate exchange of health information for greater gains in technology adoption and improvement of patient outcomes. Consistent with NATE’s mission to address the legal, policy and technical barriers that inhibit health information exchange between data holders and healthcare consumers, NATE leads and participates in a number of ongoing and emerging projects focused on exchange via multiple modes of transport, including Direct secure messaging and APIs. NATE’s Blue Button for Consumers (NBB4C) Trust Bundle provides a technical solution to establishing scalable trust among organizations using Direct secure messaging to exchange protected health information between HIPAA covered entities and the consumers that they serve. The NBB4C includes the trust anchors of multiple consumer-facing applications (CFAs) that have elected to adopt a common set of policies and practices that enable consumer mediated health information exchange while upholding personal privacy preferences. Stakeholders interested in participating in NATE’s work to support consumer mediated exchange should consider NATE membership or subscribe to News from NATE on the NATE website at http://nate-trust.org.
Back to HCB News
