CMS Eases 'Burdensome' IT Rules

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency known as CMS, is streamlining the telemedicine physician-credentialing process to end "burdensome" regulatory requirements that might have hampered innovation in health-care delivery.

The revised rules also will make it easier for small, rural and critical-access hospitals (CAHs) to offer telemedicine services, according to the 83-pageCMS rule-change to be published Thursday.

The change eases the credentialing rules hospitals must follow for physicians and practitioners who want to confer with their patients via telemedicine but don't work onsite or need hospital privileges.

That would include specialists at large academic medical centers who confer with local physicians via a computer teleconference, for example, or who interpret MRI images remotely. Under the old rules, practitioners already credentialed by their own hospitals nonetheless had to go through a multistep credentialing process for the rural hospital.