06/17/2020

CMMI Announces Flexibilities to the Oncology Care Model During COVID-19 Pandemic

June 4, 2020

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMMI) announced new flexibilities and adjustments to its current and future alternative payment models in response to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE).

Of note for the cancer community, CMMI made the following changes to the Oncology Care Model:

• Payment Methodology
  • Option for OCM practices to elect to forgo upside and downside risk for performance periods affected by the PHE
  • For OCM practices that remain in one- or two-sided risk for the performance periods affected by the PHE, remove COVID-19 episodes from reconciliation for those performance periods
• Quality Reporting
  • Make the following optional for the affected performance periods:
    • Aggregate-level reporting of quality measures
    • Beneficiary-level reporting of clinical and staging data
  • Remove the requirement for cost and resource utilization reporting and practice transformation plan reporting in July/August 2020
• Timeline
  • Extend model for 1 year through June 2022