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Announcing the New Medlearn Matters�Information for Medicare
Providers
Educational Resource for Medicare
Providers
Provider Types
Affected
All Medicare providers.
Provider Action Needed
The Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services and your Medicare Learning Network introduces
Medlearn
Matters�Information for Medicare Providers,
a new educational resource for Medicare Providers. Medlearn
Matters�Information for Medicare
Providers is designed to inform you of important changes to
the
Medicare system in a user-friendly format that will
accommodate your busy schedule.
Please let us know if these articles help you
understand these changes more readily. Provide us with
suggestions for improvements to articles. If there
is a special topic of interest that you believe warrants an
article, let us know and we will consider a special
edition for that topic. To provide feedback, please go to:
Bookmark this page, use it frequently, and let us
know how best to continue providing good service
to you.
Background
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS) is committed to partnering with the Medicare
physician, provider, and supplier communities so
services to Medicare beneficiaries can be timely and of
the highest quality. One way of providing the best
services to Medicare patients is assuring that the
providers of care have ready access to Medicare�s
latest coverage and reimbursement rules and policies in
a brief, accurate, and easy-to-understand
format.
CMS recognizes that the Medicare provider
communities have been hampered by the number, frequency,
and complexity of Medicare changes. CMS also
appreciates the feedback from those same providers who
indicate that Medicare rules and changes are not
always relayed to them in an easy, timely, and consistent
manner.
To address those issues, CMS has implemented a new
initiative -- "Consistency in Medicare Contractor
Outreach Material" or CMCOM, designed to provide
more timely information on Medicare changes. The
product of this effort, Medlearn
Matters�Information for Medicare Providers, is a series of articles
prepared
by actual clinicians and billing experts.
Medlearn Matters�Information for Medicare Providers articles
are
tailored, in content and language, to the specific
provider types who are affected by Medicare changes.
Previously, each Medicare carrier and intermediary
was responsible for crafting educational articles within
days of release of the related Medicare change.
With this new effort, the Medicare carrier or fiscal
intermediary will still be responsible for local
provider education. However, they will benefit from the
availability of Medlearn Matters�Information for
Medicare Providers articles to support their efforts. These
articles are easily accessible from the Medlearn
Web site, which providers already access for other
Medicare information.
Enlisting the expertise of medical professionals to
develop these articles and providing them from a single
location will result in more consistent, accurate,
and timely information than in the past. This initiative
supplements and should improve the ability of your
carrier or intermediary to provide better service to you.
Those of you who have relied on Medicare Program
Memorandums or Manual Transmittals on the Web,
may be familiar with the Change Request (CR)
documents and their accompanying CR numbers. Since
you may have used the original CRs to get early
information on upcoming changes, we think you will agree
that those documents were not always clear as to
provider impact and action needed.
One reason is that those CRs were written to
provide instructions to Medicare carriers, intermediaries, and
Medicare system maintainers. Thus, the focus of the
message was quite different and probably contained
more information than providers needed to know. The
intent of Medlearn Matters�Information
for
Medicare Providers articles is to help focus the
information more toward providers, to give you only the
information you need and thus reduce the amount of
time you need to spend on that information.
The articles will be placed on the Medlearn Web
site on the new Medlearn Matters�Information
for
Medicare Providers page. Each article�s number will
usually correspond to the number of the Change
Request (CR) that officially announced the change,
but the number will be preceded by MM to show it is a
related Medlearn Matters�Information for
Medicare Providers article. There are exceptions, designated as
Special Editions. These articles will be numbered
in a distinctive manner, as "SEyynn" where "SE" stands
for Special Edition, the "yy" is the two-digit year
the article was released, and "nn" is the number of the
special edition for that year. Thus, this first
Special Edition article is numbered as SE0301.
To view all the articles available , please visit:
http://www.cms.hhs.gov/medlearn/matters
We hope you find this new vehicle of assistance to you and we invite your feedback. |
