Very Brief Blog: Mandatory Hospital-Physician Demo's Thrown Overboard by CMS

It's been pending since Thomas Price was (briefly) head of HHS.   For those who protested and/or despised mandatory regional CMS bundling demonstration programs, such as for hip replacement, they're gone.

CMS announced today that several mandatory demo projects were being thrown overboard and the Federal Register announcement is December 1.   The demonstration programs required countless thousands of manhours and many hundreds of pages of federal rule-making to set up.

Read about it at CMS press release, here, and Fierce Healthcare, here, MedCity News here. CMMI will continue to do demonstration programs, but not mandatory ones.  (See recent "reform CMMI" articles here).