Support Act
The Substance Use–Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities Act, or SUPPORT Act, was signed into law in January of 2018. Several important effects on the CMS open payments program went into effect with the Act, beginning with a transition period to allow the initial collection of additional required data. Most visibly the Act resulted in the addition of five provider types to the reportable providers list, whereas physicians have historically been the only applicable provider type:
- Physician Assistants
- Nurse practitioners
- Clinical nurse specialists
- Certified registered nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologist assistants
- Certified nurse midwives
The SUPPORT Act focuses on expanding the CMS open payments program to further address and allow a deeper response “To provide for opioid use disorder prevention, recovery, and treatment, and for other purposes.” It does this through enhanced monitoring of business relationships between device & pharmaceutical manufacturers and providers through the required recording of all applicable financial and reimbursement activity. The overall theme is avoidance of inappropriate influence – or at the very least – maintaining a visibly ethical standing.
Another equally important Program update is the Act’s inclusion of National Provider Identification numbers (NPIs) to the CMS open payments program database. For clear reasons this is a wise update, given the addition of so many applicable providers. Previous iterations of the program’s database relied on searching for providers by name and location – often resulting in inaccurate results or time-consuming searches.
The SUPPORT Act includes a number of additional provisions to assist with the ongoing opioid epidemic, however the above-mentioned details are the primary updates applicable to Venops services and compliance tools. To review the complete Act please visit congress.gov here.