NASHVILLE – Tennessee’s largest professional organization for doctors is calling for significant improvements to federal healthcare regulations that it says would improve healthcare in Tennessee as well as the rest of the United States.

In a letter sent to Tom Price, MD, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Tennessee Medical Association outlines a list of existing regulations and interpretative guidelines that result in daily administrative hassles for physicians and medical practices and negatively affect the delivery of care to Medicare and Medicaid patients.

“We have heard from doctors and medical office professionals on the front lines of practice every day how burdensome, unnecessary federal regulations rob time from patient care,” said Keith G. Anderson, MD, a Memphis cardiologist and TMA President. “Now that a physician with extensive medical practice and health policy-making experience occupies the HHS office, we have an opportunity to shift the focus toward what is best for patients instead of what benefits health plans, government bureaucracies, and third parties who never see a patient.”

In its correspondence to Secretary Price, TMA details a range of items that it says either need to be repealed or amended and urges the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to take suggested actions. Among those listed as high priority:

• Allow physicians to privately contract with Medicare patients for medical services of their choice with no penalties.
• Ease the regulatory burden of Exclusion Database checks by requiring checks only for new hires, or at least reducing the frequency of required checks.
• Institute protections for patients that allow their established primary care physician to conduct – and bill for – the Medicare annual wellness visit even if the patient has received a screening from another, less familiar source.
• Use the Medicare program as the model of network adequacy protection for beneficiaries by reducing the ability of health insurance carriers to utilize narrow networks.
• Hold the Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) more accountable with financial penalties for poor performance and incentivizing RACs to identify underpayments made to physicians during the audit process.
• Discontinue using pain management satisfaction surveys for payment; record only for hospital internal use. Related incentives have inadvertently contributed to the prescription drug abuse epidemic in Tennessee and across the U.S.
• Provide funding support and/or regulatory relief when physicians treat patients requiring language or sign interpretation, or ease the rules to allow for family member interpreters and other, less expensive options.
• Make any new bundled payment programs voluntary instead of forcing physicians to participate even when it does not benefit patients.
• Preserve the right of patients to access in-office compounded drugs without onerous barriers.
• Return consistency to the process of delivering uncovered medical services to patients by doing away with pre-service organizational determinations in favor of advance beneficiary notices in the Medicare Advantage program.
• Suspend all regulatory requirements that mandate submission of electronic clinical quality measures, which add administrative burden without apparent benefit for patient care.

Anderson said TMA hopes that through these and other recommendations outlined in the letter, CMS will help reduce red tape in the delivery of medical care to seniors and vulnerable patients.

TMA represents more than 9,000 Tennessee physicians in all medical specialties, geographic regions and practice environments.