Bipartisan Ways & Means Legislation to Improve High Quality Health Care Delivery Approved by House

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Health care providers that deliver high-quality, cost-effective care to American patients will be able to operate more efficiently thanks to bipartisan legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives. The Health Care Efficiency Through Flexibility Act (H.R. 5347), introduced by Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Vern Buchanan (FL-16) and fellow Committee member Representative Jimmy Panetta (CA-19), recognizes the benefits Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) provide to patients in the way of value-based care, but also that current reporting processes required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are onerous and costly. As more ACOs deploy sophisticated electronic health records (EHRs) to streamline data reporting to CMS, the legislation provides ACOs with certainty and flexibility to help make the transition to digital quality measure reporting successful.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) issued the following statement:

"Accountable Care Organizations are a critical part of improving the quality and lowering the cost of health care for more Americans. Of course, there are and ought to be necessary reporting requirements to ensure value-based care models are achieving their goals. However, the more onerous such requirements become, the less time and resources these health care providers have to focus on delivering on the best care they can to patients. Thanks to this bipartisan effort to inject some additional certainty, clarity, and flexibility into the quality measure reporting system, we can make the transition toward better electronic data less costly and less of an impediment to care delivery."

Health Care Efficiency Through Flexibility Act (H.R. 5347)

• Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are groups of providers participating in a value-based care initiative to reduce spending and improve health care quality.
• Over 12,500 participant providers are at federally qualified health centers, rural health clinics, and critical access hospitals.
• To participate, ACOs must submit quality measure data to CMS to inform their performance and shared savings awards - a time-consuming and expensive process that may cost an ACO millions of dollars.
• Electronic data such as digital quality measures (dQMs) have the potential to be 95 percent less expensive to report than traditional quality measures, potentially yielding up to $14 billion in national health care savings.
• CMS has failed to commit to a stable framework of quality reporting or provide a comprehensive timeline for transitioning ACOs to dQMs.
• The bill ensures stability in quality measure reporting methods through 2030, providing certainty and flexibility for smaller provider practices with less sophisticated EHRs and creates a dQM pilot program to prepare ACOs to modernize reporting and test best practices in quality measurement reporting.

Read a fact sheet on the bill here.

The bill passed the Committee with a vote of 43-0.

The bill was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives with unanimous consent.