Accreditation to Begin With 10 MSAs

Baltimore

Mandatory accreditation for Medicare DME suppliers will start with the 10 metropolitan statistical areas where competitive bidding will take place in 2007, a CMS official recently announced.

Confirming what insiders have been speculating for some time, the announcement that accreditation will be implemented in stages was made during a special CMS Open Door Forum Sept. 26 on the newly released draft of quality standards for suppliers (see story at left).

Eventually all DMEPOS suppliers who want to participate in Medicare will have to meet the quality standards — including business and product-specific requirements — which will be applied by CMS-approved accrediting bodies as mandated under the Medicare Modernization Act.

But frustration and confusion with the proposed standards — and CMS — was apparent following release of the draft, developed by CMS contractor Abt Associates, Cambridge, Mass. Before the meeting started, stakeholders scrambled to make sense of the 104-page document, which was released on Sept. 23, the Friday before the Monday Open Door Forum.

“I appreciate the detail and the work that’s gone into the document, but I was a little concerned that we only had in essence a business day to review a 100-page document to provide some comments,” Don Clayback, senior vice president of networks for Lubbock, Texas-based The Med Group, told CMS officials at the meeting.

CMS also announced a revised timeline for the process, raising new concerns that providers who want to take part in Medicare’s DME bid may not have enough time to get accredited before 2007. According to Linda Smith, CMS project officer, the final quality standards now will likely be published in March or April of 2006, at the same time that the 10 MSAs where bidding is to begin will be announced. Only then, after the standards are finalized, will the agency release information on how accreditation organizations can apply for “deemed status” to become official accrediting bodies.

Clayback estimated that, according to the CMS timeline, selection of the accreditors would occur in the summer or fall of 2006. Smith responded with few details: “When the rule is final and published, we will then provide the Federal Register notice to receive application from accreditation organizations. I cannot give you a specific date.”

Previously, approved accreditors were expected to be named by the year’s end or by early 2006 at the latest.

“It’s not the progress we thought would be made by this time this year,” said forum attendee Mary Ellen Conway, president of Capital Healthcare Group, a Bethesda, Md.-based health care consulting firm. “I think it’s frustrating because it really doesn’t move the process along in a timely manner.”