On January 9, 2024, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finally approved New York State’s 1115 waiver amendment to establish the New York Health Equity Reform (NYHER) Program. That application, which is the successor to the state’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) Program that expired in March 2020, was first described in a concept paper issued by the Department of Health (DOH) in August 2021, and was filed with CMS in September 2022. The approved waiver amendment, which expires on March 31, 2027, includes most of the features included in the original application, but not all.
The overall goals of NYHER include:
- Health-Related Social Needs: Investments in health-related social needs (HRSN) via greater integration between primary care providers and community-based organizations, with a goal of improved quality and outcomes.
- Health Equity: Improving quality and outcomes of enrollees in geographic areas that have a longstanding history of health disparities and disengagement from the health system, including through an incentive program for safety net providers with exceptional exposure to enrollees with historically worse health outcomes and HRSN challenges.
- Integrated Care: Focus on integrated primary care, behavioral health, and HRSN with a goal to improve population health and health equity outcomes for high-risk enrollees, including kids/youth, pregnant and postpartum individuals, the chronically homeless, and individuals with substance use disorder (SUD).
- Workforce: Workforce investments with a goal of equitable and sustainable access to care in Medicaid.
- Regional Approaches: Developing regionally focused approaches, including new value-based purchasing (VBP) programs, with a goal of statewide accountability for improving health, outcomes, and equity.
These goals are embodied in four new initiatives: (1) HRSN, (2) a Health Equity Regional Organization (HERO), (3) Medicaid Hospital Global Budget Initiative, and (4) Strengthen the Workforce. Each will be examined in turn.Continue Reading CMS Approves a New 1115 Waiver Amendment: The New York Health Equity Reform (NYHER) Program
In continuing efforts to address problems exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, on June 18, 2021, the Governor signed legislation (S.1168-A/A.108-B) into law to address an urgent public policy priority related to clinical staffing in hospitals licensed pursuant to Article 28 of the New York State Public Health Law. This legislation requires the establishment of clinical staffing committees to create plans to more effectively distribute staff throughout general hospitals. The staffing committees must consist of at least fifty percent (50%) of registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and ancillary staff providing direct patient care, and up to fifty percent (50%) of hospital administrators, including, but not limited to, the chief financial officer, the chief nursing officer, and patient care unit directors or managers or their designees. The staffing committees shall create staffing plans with guidelines as to how many patients are assigned to each nurse, as well as how each unit is staffed with ancillary staff, based on patient needs and ratios, matrices or grids, which shall be used as the primary component of the general hospital staffing budget, provided that such staffing plans meet or exceed the terms of existing collective bargaining agreements.
In recent months, there has been a lot of attention on decisions made during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York State in regard to nursing homes. Some of that attention has focused on an order issued in the early days of the pandemic requiring nursing homes to readmit COVID-positive residents previously referred
As policymakers have responded to the COVID pandemic, they have implemented a variety of changes that create tremendous opportunities in the post-COVID world. Perhaps the most significant of these is in the area of telehealth. The remote delivery of healthcare and health-related services has tremendous implications for patient access to care and quality of outcomes,
