CMS Physician Engagement and Burden Reduction Initiative

Executive Summary

Clinicians now spend more time on administrative tasks than on patient care. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently launched the Clinician Experience and Burden Reduction initiative to better engage with clinicians in the Medicare program. Central to this is hearing from clinicians around the country through local listening sessions about the burdensome aspects of their practices that relate to CMS, such as provider enrollment, documentation, and quality reporting. The feedback from these listening sessions will help inform Agency strategic priorities. CMS already hears from clinicians through multiple channels, but the existing tools to collect feedback are initiative-specific and incapable of readily sharing and aggregating data. To providers, interacting with CMS can feel piecemeal and frustrating. Without a system-based solution to help CMS interact with clinicians, the feedback collected in our newest initiative will be added to the existing pile instead of being collected and translated into meaningful action.

To solve this problem, CMS has created the Office of Clinician Engagement to hear feedback and turn it into meaningful action. CMS hears feedback from clinicians through disparate mechanisms, and feedback is acted upon in unpredictable ways. This team seeks to aggregate and synthesize feedback from clinicians in to CMS to inform priorities areas for clinician burden reduction.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

Jon Langmead (Project Lead), CMS
Stefanie Costello, CMS
Aditi Mallick, CMS

Milestones

January 2017: Project selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
February 2017: Time in the Accelerator began