Today, the Senate Chronic Care Working Group released a list of priorities to improve health outcomes for Medicare patients with chronic conditions. This is the first step toward producing bipartisan legislation that will most likely introduced in 2016. Transitional Care received a lot of big advances in this policy document and we are excited to share the following highlights with you.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued two final rules that NTOCC has commented on earlier in the year. The first updates payment policies and payment rates for services furnished under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for calendar year 2016, and the second is regarding the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Systems and Quality Reporting Programs.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a proposed rule this morning that would require all hospitals and home health agencies to develop a written discharge plan for every inpatient and specific categories of outpatients within 24 hours of admission. This is the first step in the implementation of the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act which NTOCC supported in 2014.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that it is extending the enforcement moratorium for part of the “two-midnights” rule until the new proposed rule takes effect on January 1, 2016. As you may recall, the “two midnights” rule states that hospital stays that are shorter than two nights would be classified as outpatient. The “two midnights” has been extremely controversial in the NTOCC community, the health care community at large and on Capitol Hill. It creates confusion for the patient and relies on an arbitrary length of time for a patient’s assessment as opposed to the expertise of the health care provider.

This morning, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century Cures Initiative (H.R. 6) by a bipartisan vote of 344-77. The House passage comes at the end of a year-and-a-half long effort led by Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and fellow Committee member Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO).

Today, the Energy and Commerce Committee released the final language for the 21st Century Cures Initiative. This bill is similar to what was reported unanimously out of the Energy and Commerce Committee in June 2015. A few changes include reducing the new NIH funding increase from $10 billion to $8.75 billion in mandatory spending over the next five years and finalizing the interoperability language. We expect a vote in the full House of Representatives as early as next Thursday.

The House overwhelmingly passed the Medicare physician-reform bill, also known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) “doc fix”, on Thursday afternoon by a vote of 392-27, with 212 Republicans and 108 Democrats voting in favor of the legislation. The bill, which we outlined in more detail in an earlier update, will phase in a new payment system over the next few years that will focus on rewarding doctors who provide high-value—as opposed to high-volume—care. It will also extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for another two years.

On March 31, 2015, the current “patch” for SGR will expire. The Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, which was first implemented in 1997, calls for automatic reductions in Medicare reimbursement rates for providers if overall Medicare spending exceeds a target rate. Without further action by Congress to temporarily avoid the cuts or permanently replace the flawed formula, providers will face a 25% cut in reimbursements beginning April 1, 2015.

Today, President Obama released his $4.066 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2016, outlining the administration’s policy priorities for the coming year, which is largely viewed as a Democratic blueprint for lofty policy proposals that will face strong opposition by the Republican-controlled Congress.

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued their draft nationwide health IT interoperability roadmap titled: Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap Version 1.0. This draft was referenced by Kelly Cronin at the National Transitions of Care Summit this past December. Today’s release is a continuation of the commitment to building a more robust health IT structure as part of a Department-wide effort to achieve better care, smarter spending, and improve health outcomes by improving our health care delivery system.