Recent amendments to federal agency regulatory forms could reduce burdens on healthcare providers who self-report violations of a federal law that bars physicians from making self-referrals, McGuireWoods Chicago partner Tim Fry told Healthcare Risk Management in the publication’s May edition.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced updates to its voluntary self-referral disclosure protocol (SRDP) that could significantly will reduce the paperwork required if physicians or healthcare providers do self-disclose, Fry said.
“It will impact providers if they faulted on the Stark law,” Fry said. “This is good news for them.”
The changes should benefit CMS as well, Fry said. CMS probably has received more SRDP forms than it ever anticipated, and each one takes time to assess. Previously, providers had to complete separate forms for each physician in a group with a prohibited referral, and Fry recently facilitated a self-disclosure for a group with 30 physician partners where the disclosure was the same for each one. The revisions will allow submission of a single form to disclose multiple compensation arrangements with different physicians.
“You don’t want to submit mistakes to the government, so you go through line by line, and your client goes through 30 of these things line by line to make sure there were no copy-and-paste errors,” Fry said. “Then, of course, you submit it to the government, and the government has to read those 30 documents line by line to see if maybe Dr. Smith has something slightly different than Dr. Jones. Now, we’re doing one document that we are filling out, and then we’re going to submit a chart.”