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AHA participated today in a stakeholder listening session hosted by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma to formally launch the agency’s regulatory relief effort. AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack thanked the agency for recent actions to reduce the regulatory burden on health care providers, noting a new AHA report that found non-clinical regulatory requirements cost providers nearly $39 billion a year and divert clinicians from patient care. To further reduce this regulatory burden, he encouraged the agency to modernize “fraud and abuse rules” to allow hospitals and doctors to collaborate on additional innovative care models; align quality reporting across all its programs and focus on “measures that matter”; ensure hospitals are not penalized by audits that use unfair sampling methods to determine Medicare repayments; and expand and make more flexible Medicare coverage of telehealth services, among other actions. For more on how the scope and volume of regulatory requirements are diverting resources from the patient-centered mission of health systems, hospitals and post-acute care providers, visit www.aha.org/regrelief.