Mary S. Barton

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is continuing to reinforce its ongoing focus on decreasing the per capita cost of care, while simultaneously improving outcomes and managing population health. Recently, CMS announced the Pre-Claim Review Demonstration, commonly known in the industry as prior authorization. This action is aimed at identifying care that is not within the “reasonable and necessary” guidelines before home health agencies file their final claims with Medicare.

Two decades before the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 sparked the First World War, a wave of anarchist terrorism had taken the lives of seven heads of state in Russia, Europe, and the United States, and caused hundreds of civilian causalities. In response to these attacks, continental European governments called for collective action against the common danger.