Government Archives - HIT Leaders and News

CMS and FDA RAPID: Faster Device Coverage Needs Stronger Evidence Discipline

Jason Free — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:41:01 +0000

The new RAPID coverage pathway from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reflects a long-running frustration in medical technology policy: authorization and coverage are separate decisions, and patients often wait in the gap between the two.

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Doctor Arrested, Accused of Health Care Fraud, Illegally Prescribing Drugs: Fraud Risk Starts With Weak Supervision

Jason Free — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:38:33 +0000

The federal indictment of a Columbia, Missouri urgent care physician should not be read only as an allegation of individual misconduct. It also is a warning about what can happen when clinical delegation, billing authority, and controlled substance prescribing operate without durable oversight.

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HHS Announces $4 Million KidneyX EMPOWER Prize Challenge and Health Technology Project

Jason Free — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:49:31 +0000

The new living-donor prize challenge from the Department of Health and Human Services is a useful signal, but the signal matters more than the purse. The federal government is implicitly acknowledging that living kidney donation has not been held back by a lack of goodwill or a lack of clinical capability.

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Brace Fraud Exposes Medicare’s Order Blind Spot

Jason Free — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:39:51 +0000

The April 14 sentencing of a Florida nursing assistant in an $11.4 million orthotic-brace fraud scheme is easy to treat as a familiar enforcement item. According to the Department of Justice, the defendant used a Florida durable medical equipment supplier to bill Medicare for braces that beneficiaries did not request or need, while concealing true ownership and relying on illegal kickbacks to obtain signed doctors’ orders, as outlined in the April 14 sentencing announcement.

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Prior Authorization Enters Its Infrastructure Era

Jason Free — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:32:07 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is using its 2026 proposed rule on interoperability and drug prior authorization to do more than shorten approval timelines.

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CMS Draws a Harder Line on Medicare Advantage

Jason Free — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:13:21 +0000

The latest CMS rate notice is easy to misread. On paper, the agency is still increasing payments to Medicare Advantage plans in 2027. In substance, it is drawing a sharper distinction between legitimate clinical risk and revenue built on documentation tactics that have long inflated the program’s economics.

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A Cleaner Chain of Command for Health IT

Jason Free — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:56:45 +0000

Administrative reshuffles inside HHS usually land as management trivia. This one does not. The department’s March 31, 2026 decision to return enterprise technology, data, and AI leadership to the Office of the Chief Information Officer while restoring the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to a narrower health IT policy role arrives at a point when governance failures are no longer abstract.

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The CMS Rule That Finally Targets the Paperwork Nobody Fixed

Jason Free — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:47:44 +0000

The latest move from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will be easy to underestimate because it sounds so administrative. The newly finalized health care claims attachments rule deals with documentation, transaction standards, and electronic signatures, not a flashy care model or a breakthrough therapy. Yet it may prove to be one of the more important healthcare modernization actions in years precisely because it aims at a part of the system that has remained stubbornly primitive long after the industry declared itself digital.

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When Fraud Reaches the Exam Room

Jason Free — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:01:25 +0000

The federal case against Anchorage rheumatologist Claribel Tan should not be read as a routine fraud prosecution with unusually vivid facts. In a March 17 sentencing release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska, the Department of Justice said the scheme involved more than $12.5 million in health care fraud, more than $4.2 million in tax loss, and conduct that stretched across 15 years. What makes the case editorially important is not only the money. It is the allegation that the fraud was built into treatment itself.

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CMS Rule Phases Out Fax Machines and Snail Mail

Jason Free — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:58:20 +0000

The latest administrative simplification rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services may sound like a narrow technical update, but in its final rule fact sheet the agency says it creates the first HIPAA-adopted standards for health care claims attachments and electronic signatures. That makes the policy less about retiring fax machines than about fixing one of healthcare’s oldest operational failures: the messy, manual handoff between clinical documentation and payment.

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