AAHKS Leadership meets with CMS Staff

Jay R. Lieberman, MD, AAHKS President, and Richard Iorio, MD, Health Policy Council Chair traveled to Baltimore this week to meet with CMS. Working with our advocacy firm Epstein Becker & Green, AAHKS leaders along with Executive Director, Michael J. Zarski, JD and Advocacy and International Activities Director, Joshua Kerr discussed the development of the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) under the new Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). MIPS will introduce a new, value-based payment system for medicine. They met with Kate Goodrich, MD, CMS Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality and her staff who are overseeing the implementation of MIPS. They also met with staff from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which oversees bundled payment and other pilot programs. Discussions centered around how AAHKS can engage with CMS to ensure arthroplasty measures are developed to the highest quality with input from experts in the hip and knee arthroplasty field. AAHKS will follow up with both groups and plan to meet with them more informally on a regular basis.