Medicare to alter enrollment form: provider enrollment.(Practice Trends)

WASHINGTON -- Medicare plans to revise its proposed enrollment form to make it more user friendly for physicians, Robert Loyal said at a meeting of the Medicare Practicing Physicians Advisory Council.

"Some of the language in the form could be softened," said Mr. Loyal, director of the division of provider and supplier enrollment at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Baltimore.

Earlier this year, CMS issued a proposed rule to simplify the enrollment policy for health providers and suppliers and raise the bar on qualifications.

A primary goal was to weed out me "bad actors" with criminal backgrounds who "could rip off the Medicare trust funds," Jack Emery, assistant director of the American Medical Association's division of federal affairs, Washington, said at the meeting.

But in comments to the agency, medical organizations criticized numerous provisions in the proposed rule that would prove burdensome and costly to physicians. Chief among them was a requirement that Medicare providers and suppliers revalidate the accuracy of their enrollment information every 3 years.

The groups also opposed language that would require all physicians--those currently in or initially enrolling in the program--to complete CMS 855I, a form that applies to individual health care practitioners such as physicians who wish to bill carriers.

"It's reasonable that Medicare has some kind of enrollment process, but the form is too complicated," said Practicing Physicians Advisory Council (PPAC) chair Michael T. Rapp, an emergency physician in Arlington, Va.