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Medicare & Medicare Drug Program News
CMS Administrator Praises Report on Medication
Errors, Sets Plans for Change
To set standards to ensure consistency, efficiency
in prescribing for Part D
July 21, 2006 Mark McClellan, administrator of
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, issued a statement
following the release yesterday of the report by the Institute of
Medicine on the excessive death and injury caused by medication errors.
The study was funded by CMS. McClellan outlined steps Medicare will take
to address the problem.
McClellan said the report "found that errors in
prescriptions and failures to prescribe prescriptions result in pain,
suffering, and deaths, as well as billions of dollars of unnecessary
expenses.
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"It is a problem that affects all healthcare
settings and services, including hospitals, pharmacies, doctors offices,
nursing homes, and home health a problem that HHS (Health & Human
Services) is focusing much of its attention on resolving."
He said, "Our vision for the future is this
high-quality care system; a system that empowers patients and their
health care providers to make the best decisions and get the best
possible care. That requires government, industry, providers and
practitioners alike in responding and meeting the demands for quality
care and providing it."
"The IOM recommendations underscore the important
role government has in providing its resources to raise the standards in
addressing the problem," he added.
According to McClellan, CMS has begun implementing
the e-prescribing provisions of the Medicare Modernization Act by
issuing standards that help to ensure consistency and efficiency in
prescribing drugs as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
In addition, CMS is:
● Conducting e-prescribing pilot projects to
improve patient safety, improve the efficiency of providing prescription
drugs and using electronic messaging standards to ensure that
pharmacists and physicians and their staffs have the information they
need about a patients history;
● Requiring Medicare prescription drug plans to
support e-prescribing standards for use by those providers who prescribe
drugs for beneficiaries electronically, once national standards are
issued;
● Issuing a final regulation in the very near
future to promote the adoption of electronic health records with
e-prescribing by providing for exceptions under the physician
self-referral statute and the anti-kickback statute to create a safe
harbor for certain arrangements involving the donation of electronic
prescribing and health records;
● Educating beneficiaries about the drugs they
take, following a medication regimen for a specific condition, providing
information about formulary-based drug coverage, including formulary
alternatives and co-pay information, and speeding up the process of
renewing medications by reducing the number of phone calls to the plans;
● Using drug data to identify safety problems
and adverse events, including those needing nursing home or home care,
enabling a new tool for efficient insight into prescribing practices,
patterns of error, and potential efficiencies;
● Collecting data and publishing performance
measures related to the effective use of medications, including 11
measures of care that directly measure correct medication use on
www.HospitalCompare.hhs.gov;
● Working with local Quality Improvement
Organizations to use medication reconciliation and focus on the
reliability of transfers and handoffs from one care setting to another;
● Testing approaches to pay health care
providers more for providing better quality care to Medicare
beneficiaries, including more effective use of drug therapies; and
● Requiring survey and certification of nursing
facilities to include substantial requirements to avoid misuse of
medication, including preventing the overuse of psychoactive drugs.
"But government cannot and should not address it
alone," added McClellan.
"CMS and HHS are also enhancing potential
public-private partnerships to improve drug safety for all Americans. We
are actively engaged in a number of public-private partnerships, through
which we have formed trusting relationships for building consensus about
measurement and public reporting.
"Together we are building on collaborative
relationships that help in supporting measurement and reporting of
serious preventable errors, working to develop standard measures of care
and encouraging the public reporting of information about unsafe patient
care.
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