CMS Patients over Paperwork: Home Health Journey
In 2017, Administrator Seema Verma launched the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's (CMS) Patients over Paperwork (PoP) initiative. The initiative aims to "cut the red tape", identify "duplicative, unnecessary, or excessively costly [administrative] requirements" and remove "outdated regulations" in order to make the healthcare CMS helps provide more patient-centric.
In collaboration with CMS, our multidisciplinary team utilized Human-Centered Design (HCD) and Data Science to understand and map out the experiences of CMS beneficiaries, their families, healthcare providers, and other internal and external stakeholders in relation to various CMS benefits, such as hospital care, dialysis, hospice, and home health.
As part of the home health team, I conducted design research to identify challenges, bright spots, patterns, and meaningful insights. After collecting and synthesizing the data, I co-lead the development and refinement of visual artifacts and reports to communicate those research findings, as well as potential opportunities for burden alleviation and service improvement. The primary visual communication piece developed, "Home Health Journey: Navigating the Home Health Maze" was published by CMS in their February 2020 Patients over Paperwork newsletter.
In November 2019, after our team delivered our findings surrounding home health, CMS announced in Volume 10 of the Patients over Paperwork newsletter they would be reducing administrative burdens surrounding the Home Health benefit by simplifying home health recertification, updating the Home Health Prospective Payment
System to allow therapist assistants to perform maintenance therapy, and implementing the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) payment methodology.
On CMS.gov, you can read Administrator Seema Verma's remarks on the Patients over Paperwork anniversary, learn more about how CMS is reducing administrative burden, and see additional stakeholder journeys Booz Allen collaboratively mapped with CMS for the Patients over Paperwork initiative.
