By Clinical Informatics News Staff

January 14, 2015 | At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference on Tuesday, Andy Slavitt, acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, predicted the end of the meaningful use program and an increased focus on interoperable technology.

Slavitt has been serving as acting administrator since February 2015. He joined CMS in July 2014 from Optum, and referred to himself as a “recovering entrepreneur” in his speech, highlighting his private sector experience several times. In July 2015, President Obama nominated Slavitt to formally take administrator position.

Slavitt started his presentation at the investor conference by highlighting 2015’s successes including implementing ICD-10 (“the biggest event no one heard about,” he quipped), expanding Medicaid, launching the largest data transparency initiative in health care, and newly-insuring 17 million Americans through the Affordable Care Act.

Under his leadership, Slavitt said CMS has built a cultural focus on listening and learning. The CMS’s mandate now, he said, is to launch programs and nurture them to maturity. “It demands we change our culture and execute with clarity, with discipline, and with collaboration. Things we haven’t always been known for,” he said.

To remedy that, Slavitt listed what he said were the 2016 priorities for CMS. Along with Medicaid improvements and updates to the Health Insurance Marketplaces, Slavitt highlighted technology as a key component in implementing the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015.

MACRA offers the opportunity to “sunset” old programs and align them into the new initiative, Slavitt said. “That program needs to be streamlined and simple to use so physicians can focus where they need to—on their patients.”

The most dramatic of those sunsets is certain to be the meaningful use program. “Now that we effectively have technology into virtually every place care is provided,” Slavitt said, the program will be “effectively over.” Moving forward, “focus will move away from rewarding providers for the use of technology and towards the outcome they achieve with their patients,” he said.

In turn, the technology landscape will be significantly opened, Slavitt said. “Like any good start up, we will start small and leave a lot of tool building opportunities to the private sector.” Technology companies will now be able to create solutions for physician practices, not the government, he added.

CMS will mandate data interoperability. APIs will be required to “move away from the lock that early EHR decisions placed on physician organizations, and… allow apps, analytic tools, and connected technologies to get data in and out of an EHR securely,” Slavitt said. CMS is “deadly serious about interoperability,” he added. “Technology companies that look for ways to practice ‘data blocking’ in opposition to new regulations will find that it won’t be tolerated.”

Further details on the “new regime” will be released in the coming months, Slavitt said.