The Department of Health and Human ...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Advisory Committee forward Regulatory Reform recently released its final report of 255 recommendations for improving and streamlining regulatory requirements across HH agencies to improve access to quality health care and services. The recommendations involve a broad range of actions, like as ways to: reduce potential obstacles to patients' access to care, contract the time physicians and other health care professionals must exhaust on paperwork, improve communication with consumer and improve the use of technology to stir up quality care while ensuring that patients have stout privacy protections. HHS and its agencies have already implemented 26 of these recommendations, including the following: the HHS' Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched a just discovered effort to streamline Medicare's paperwork requirements for hearthstone health nurses and therapists; Medicare reduc the common occurrence that hospitals must gather detailed information from Medicare beneficiaries about other insurance; and CM propos usual way of looking at things improvements to clarify the requirements for hospitals to cover and treat patients in urgency departments. The committee's report is available online at www.regreform.hhs.gov.

COPYRIGHT 2002 American Academy of Family Physicians

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group