Any upcoming cuts to Patient Driven Payment Model rates will not occur without providers’ voices being heard, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said as it solicited comments from stakeholders through June 7.
CMS staffers encouraged providers to submit suggestions for particular cost-cutting methods during an Open Door Forum in late April. The agency’s SNF Prospective Payment System proposed rule for 2022 included plans to recalibrate PDPM’s parity adjustment after the agency found SNF spending under the new model increased by $1.7 billion.
Officials have previously acknowledged the rise could have been driven by COVID-19 and specifically called on providers to consider the pandemic’s impact on the PDPM adjustment.
In some instances, CMS combined metrics to understand the payment model’s impact, said John Kane, technical advisor and SNF payment team lead for CMS.
“These are the kinds of things that we look at and do help to inform any sort of future policy development,” Kane said. “This is by no means to represent that we are fully done with our analysis of everything in relation to PDPM … But it’s also to indicate that we have done analyses, and that we do have a variety of analytics and metrics that we have been able to look at that have led us to question
