CMS Archives - HIT Leaders and News

CMS Health Technology Office Sets Federal Digital Health Strategy

Jason Free — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:11:30 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has created the Office of Health Technology and Products, a move that deserves more attention than a routine federal reorganization. The new office formalizes a broader shift inside CMS from technology oversight as a regulatory function to technology strategy as an operating function.

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Prior Authorization Enters Its Test Phase

Jason Free — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:44:44 +0000

The next phase of prior authorization reform will not be decided by whether healthcare organizations support electronic exchange in principle. That consensus already exists. The real test is whether payers, providers, EHR developers, networks, and digital health companies can make electronic prior authorization work inside the messy conditions of actual care delivery.

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Prior Authorization Reform Becomes an Execution Test

Jason Free — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:35:05 +0000

Prior authorization reform has moved from a policy debate to an operational stress test. The central issue is no longer whether fax-driven approval workflows are inefficient. That case has been made repeatedly by physicians, patients, regulators, and payers themselves.

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CMS Solidifies Rural Health Transformation Office, but Execution Risks Remain

Jason Free — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:16:36 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has formally established the Office of Rural Health Transformation (ORHT), a move that converts legislative momentum into structural commitment. As the operational steward of the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Program, launched under the Working Families Tax Cut legislation, the ORHT is now tasked with overseeing one of the most ambitious rural health efforts in U.S. history.

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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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CMS Medicaid Payment Rule Targets State Directed Payments

Jason Free — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:43:30 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposal to cap certain Medicaid payment arrangements is a direct challenge to the financing structures states and providers have increasingly used to support Medicaid reimbursement, especially in managed care.

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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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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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Improper Payments Remain a Quiet Risk to Federal Health Program Integrity

Jason Free — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:56:43 +0000

Improper payments across federal healthcare programs continue to absorb tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year, posing a persistent operational risk that too often escapes strategic scrutiny. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released its Fiscal Year 2025 estimates, revealing a complex and often misunderstood picture of payment accuracy, documentation failures, and structural compliance breakdowns.

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ACA Enrollment Surges Past 22 Million, but Sustainability Questions Linger

Jason Free — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:53:20 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that more than 22.8 million individuals have enrolled in 2026 health insurance coverage through Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces, a record-breaking figure that surpasses all previous enrollment periods. This national snapshot captures signups from both the federal HealthCare.gov platform and state-based exchanges (SBEs), marking a clear high point in the ACA’s implementation. But behind the headline growth lies a more nuanced, and increasingly urgent, set of questions for healthcare leaders tasked with navigating cost structures, compliance shifts, and continuity of care.

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