CMS releases health equity strategy centering on outreach, data collection

By Robert King / April 20, 2022

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released its strategy to improve health equity across the agency, detailing actions on how providers can identify and close gaps in care. 

CMS’ equity action plan, released Wednesday, calls for increased efforts to expand outreach efforts to enroll people in coverage and standardize the use of data on social risk factors and other demographics. The agency has sought comments over the past year from stakeholders on how to incorporate equity into regulations. 

“Health equity will be embedded in the DNA of CMS and serve as the lens through which we view all of our work,” said CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure in a statement. 

CMS laid out its priorities for each part of the agency, including the Center for Medicare and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).

“This work includes working with and sharing best practices across states, health care facilities, providers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, people with lived experience, researchers and other key stakeholders to drive commitments to advance health equity,” the agency said in a release.

Some of the actions CMS seeks to take on equity are:

• Building on outreach effort to get more people into coverage via Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges.

• Evaluating policies to ensure they help safety net providers that often care for underserved communities.

• Promoting services in the culture and language of patients’ preferred languages and health literacy.

• Incorporating screening on social needs and promoting broader access.

The latter will include more quality measures and coordination with other organizations in the community. CMS has called for comments in recently payer and provider regulations on how to craft and implement health equity quality measures.

CMS announced that it will convene a meeting of both payer and provider stakeholders as well as state officials this summer that will focus on improving maternal health outcomes.

The agency has already given some indications on how some equity measures will be incorporated into regulations. 

CMMI recently overhauled its Direct Contracting value-based care payment model into a new model named ACO REACH. The center included a new requirement that participants adopt a health equity plan, a requirement that other models could adopt. 

Some in the payer and provider industries have made investments in equity, but CMS is hoping that its action plan will serve as a catalyst to advance equity throughout the system.