The CMS has alerted accountable care organizations participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program that they have more time to comply with a new requirement to notify assigned beneficiaries that their physician participates in the program.
The new requirement, which was originally slated to go into effect July 1, has been delayed to Oct. 1 for ACOs that started the revised program on July 1. ACOs that started their performance year in January 2019 will have until Jan. 1, 2020, to meet the notification mandate.
In a letter to CMS Administrator Seema Verma in late June, the National Association of ACOs claimed the CMS hadn’t yet provided ACOs with any information about how to comply with the policy. The CMS said in the final ruleoutlining the new requirement that it would publish materials ACOs must use to notify patients “to mitigate the burden of this additional notification.”