HHS Issues Regs To Reduce Red Tape for Hospitals, Providers

The proposed changes could result in savings of an estimated $1 billion a year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The New York Times: U.S. Moves To Cut Back Regulations On Hospitals
The Obama administration moved Tuesday to roll back numerous rules that apply to hospitals and other health care providers after concluding that the standards were obsolete or overly burdensome to the industry. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposed changes, which would apply to more than 6,000 hospitals, would save providers nearly $1.1 billion a year without creating any "consequential risks for patients" (Pear, 10/18).

The Wall Street Journal: Sebelius Rolls Out Plan To Cut Some Red Tape
The proposed changes cover hospitals’ treatment of Medicare and Medicaid patients, regulatory requirements for health-care providers and suppliers and ambulatory surgical centers (Radnofsky, 10/18).

Reuters: HHS Loosens Medicare Red Tape As Part Of Obama Plan 
[H]ospitals would no longer need a dedicated director of outpatient services and could contract out laboratory and radiology tests (Selyukh, 10/18).

Modern Healthcare: White House Moves To Ease Regulation
The rules, published in today's Federal Register, are part of the initiative President Barack Obama announced in January to eliminate unnecessary and outdated rules that hinder productive work in private companies and limits growth in the economy. The finalized rule—first proposed in April—would rollback $50 million in annual safety requirements (PDF) for ambulatory surgery centers (Daly, 10/18).

Kaiser Health News: Capsules: CMS Issues Regs To Reduce Red Tape
The bulk of the projected savings come from the changes in the conditions of participation for hospitals and critical care hospitals. The changes—such as allowing a multi-hospital system to have a single governing body or permitting non-physician providers to take on greater responsibility as defined by state law—are expected to save $900 million in the first year, according to HHS (Barr, 10/18).

National Journal: Obama Administration Proposes $1 Billion In Red Tape Savings
Much of the savings comes from freeing up highly paid specialists, such as registered nurses, from doing time-consuming paperwork (Fox, 10/18).

Medscape: Cutting Red Tape in Healthcare Can Save Billions
Requirements that all laboratory work, radiology, and other services must be performed in-house will be eliminated for critical-access hospitals in rural areas, said Sebelius.  ... Other reforms would identify and begin to eliminate duplicative, overlapping, outdated, and conflicting regulatory requirements for healthcare providers and suppliers such as end-stage renal disease facilities and durable medical equipment suppliers (Crane, 10/18).

The Hill: CMS To Scrap Healthcare Regulations, Says Hospitals Will Save $1B
Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health, said the changes don’t go far enough. “We appreciate their actions in this area and attempts to reduce the regulatory burden,” Pitts said in a news release, “however, the thousands of pages of regulations that have come out with the healthcare law, and tens of thousands more on the way, undermine the administration’s efforts to reduce burdensome regulations" (Baker, 10/18).