ATLANTA — After a number of technical problems with a Dec. 28 webinar on competitive bidding, CMS officials said they would have to reschedule the presentation for suppliers in the Charlotte, Miami and Orlando competitive bidding areas.
Among the problems, presenters were unable to mute listeners' phone lines, which left the webinar host shouting over one caller's music hold with other participants unable to hear. In addition, the ID for the audio portion of the webinar was changed after the session notice had been sent in an email, but the change was noted only on the chat section of the accompanying presentation online. One would-be participant said she held on the original conference call line for 20 minutes before realizing there was a different ID number she needed to use.
The same thing apparently happened to other callers, who complained they hadn't gotten in on the beginning of the webinar and asked for it to restart, while some attendees who had been listening for more than 20 minutes said they didn't want to go back to the beginning and start over.
Frustration among the participants was obvious as one caller asked where to locate the webinar slides. "Read your email," another listener told him. When the first caller noted he didn't have his email handy, two presenters tried to read the url address for the PowerPoint presentation, but background noise and static prevented understanding.
After more than a half-hour, CMS' Sabrina Teferi of the Atlanta regional office said the call would be rescheduled.
"When will you reschedule?" asked one caller, adding, "Because you know competitive bidding starts in a few days."
Teferi responded that listeners could contact their local CBIC ombudsman for questions about the bidding program, which will go into effect Jan. 1.
"It's a shame that three days before the implementation of this drastically new program, CMS wasn't able to figure out that a webinar needed basic technology to ensure that listeners were not able to make noise that interfered with the ability to convey information," said health care attorney Neil Caesar, who dialed into the presentation.
"Some people have said to me jokingly, how could CMS run this program when it can't run a functioning teleconference … We've already seen many, many instances of problems with CMS' administration of competitive bidding and with the program itself that go far beyond the mastery of basic teleconference technology," continued Caesar, president of the Health Law Center in Greenville, S.C.
"When we have 100 examples of problems with competitive bidding, there's not a strong need for a webinar as problem No. 101."
For a list of bid program ombudsmen in the nine Round 1 CBAs, see "CBIC Names Ombusdmen," Dec. 17.
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