Making Sense Out of CMS' Final Rule & Comment on MACRA

I've just spent several days digesting CMS' Final Rule with Comment on MACRA. It may be a while longer before doctors can look up from their computer screens and really see the patients in front of them. 

I don't know about you, but my old physician looked at his computer screen, painfully pecking away at the keys, instead of looking at me. And if he couldn't find a medications he'd been prescribing for me for years, or a new one I asked about, it would send him even further into the computer and its functions and away from me.

Meaningful use really reduced the already precious few minutes we have with our doctors. And MACRA implementation, coming, albeit slowly, in January, threatens to do more of the same. 

While it's frustrating to think that our in-person visits are little better than telehealth visits, really, the things CMS wants physicians to do are absolutely in the right direction. Our physicians should be familiar with and following quality measures set by their own peers. They should make make patient records easily accessible, ensure doctors on call have access to those same records, and more. 

Could CMS have come up with a less painful way to organize and roll this out? Maybe. But kudos to the agency for making a meaningful effort to move clinicians in the right direction. It will be painful, for both physicians and their patients.  Maybe some doctors will retire, and maybe they should. Maybe some will stop taking Medicare patients. Eventually though a new generation of physicians will see all this as possible, even obvious. We'll look back and wonder at how the old ways survived as long as they did. The key will be ensuring the next generation of clinicians are still taught the importance of really focusing and listening to their patients, looking them in the eye, asking them what is worrying them, and being the healers they set out to be. If they are so comfortable with technology that MACRA is obvious and easy, will they find the human touch just as obvious and easy?

Read my summary of MACRA here.

This reflects my own personal perspectives, not those of any Connect 4 Strategies’ clients.