CMS Introduces Proposed 2024 Inpatient Rule
On April 10, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced its 2024 proposed inpatient public payment system (IPPS) rule. WHA will analyze the full more-than 1,500-page rule in the coming weeks and prepare comments in advance of the June 9 comment deadline.
Among the notable items included in the proposal are:
- Proposes increasing inpatient PPS payment rates by a net 2.8% in FY 2024.
- Would continue CMS's efforts to smooth out the low wage index hospital policy for FY 2024. It would also treat rural reclassified hospitals as geographically rural for the purposes of calculating the wage index and would exclude “dual reclass” hospitals from the rural wage index.
- Proposes allowing graduate medical education payments to be made to Rural Emergency Hospitals to support graduate medical training in rural areas.
- Would reinstate program integrity restrictions for physician-owned hospitals approved as “high Medicaid facilities.”
- Adds 15 new MS-DRGs and deletes 16 MS-DRGs.
- Adds a new health equity adjustment and a sepsis bundle quality measure to the Hospital Value-based Purchasing Program.
- Proposes to allow the use of web-based surveys for Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems.
- Would require reporting of “up to date” vaccination status for the Inpatient Quality Reporting health care personnel COVID-19 vaccination measure.
- Contains a request for information on how CMS could better define and support safety-net providers.
Contact WHA Vice President of Federal and State Relations
Jon Hoelter with questions or comments.