Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare’s Seriously Ill Population test program is officially dead.

“After careful consideration, [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] will not move forward with the Seriously Ill Population (SIP) Component of the Primary Care First (PCF) Model,” CMS says in a message to providers. “After careful review, CMS has determined that the proposed SIP outreach method, which was designed to comply with statutory beneficiary privacy protections, is unlikely to result in sufficient beneficiary uptake to allow for model evaluation.”

Under the program, primary care providers whose clinicians were enrolled in Medicare and who typically provided hospice or palliative care services were supposed to coordinate care for high need, seriously ill beneficiaries.