New Part D Policies Address Opioid Epidemic

Early last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published a roadmap outlining our efforts to address the national opioid epidemic.  The roadmap details our three-pronged approach, including prevention of new cases of opioid use disorder (OUD), expanding access to treatment for patients who have already developed OUD, and using data from across the country to better target our prevention and treatment activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a devastating toll on Americans across the country, whether in lives lost or economic impacts, and it has particularly affected our fellow citizens who have the most vulnerabilities, including the elderly and communities of color.  We’ve been forced to adjust and adapt our daily lives in innumerable ways, while significant public health resources have had to be redirected to help us meet and beat this unprecedented pandemic.

All CMS.gov blog entries have been archived.

You can view previous blog entries by visiting the CMS.gov Blog Archive.

On April 30, CMS announced the winner and runner-up of the CMS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge (“AI Challenge”), a prize competition for innovators to demonstrate how artificial intelligence tools can be used to accelerate the development of AI solutions that predict patient health events for Medicare beneficiaries for potential use by the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) in testing innovative payment and service delivery models.

Note: This blog was originally posted on HealthAffairs.org on August 12, 2021.

Excerpt: As incoming leaders at CMS under a new administration, we have taken stock of lessons learned from the first ten years of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s operation and begun to chart a path for the next ten years of value-based care.