The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Gets Nudged to Do Something About Shared Decision Making (SDM)

Medicare tackles the shared decision
making requirement in the ACA

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, Emily Lee and Ezekiel Emanuel point out that it's high time for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to wake up and do something about Section 3506 of the Affordable Care Act.

That's the section of the law that deals with "shared decision making" (SDM):

"The Secretary shall establish a program to provide for the phased-in development, implementation, and evaluation of shared decision making using patient decision aids to meet the objective of improving the understanding of patients of their medical treatment options...."

In particular, they argue that CMS should expedite the creation of an independent entity that would certify and implement patient decision aids and begin piloting SDM among Medicare beneficiaries who are contemplating having one of the 20 most frequently performed procedures (a list can be found on page 3).

And they don't stop there. 

They recommend that Medicare's coverage for the "top 20" should be made contingent on the documented delivery of SDM to the beneficiary

"To give such a requirement teeth, full Medicare reimbursement could be made contingent on having documentation in the patient's file of the proper use of a decision aid for these 20 procedures. Providers who did not document the shared-decision-making process could face a 10% reduction in Medicare payment for claims related to the procedure in year 1, with reductions gradually increasing to 20% over 10 years. This payment scheme is similar to that currently tied to hospital-readmissions metrics."

In contrast to the NEJM readership, the thousands of regular visitors to the Disease Management Care Blog aren't surprised. They've known all along that "shared decision making was an important if unknown part of the Affordable Care Act.  To them it's not news that SDM is an evidence based approach that combines patient engagement with physician participation to optimize the utilization of potentially harmful therapies.

Pity that CMS leadership isn't regularly reading the DMCB.  Whether a NEJM article by one of D.C. health care mandarins spurs CMS to action remains to be seen.

Stay tuned!