At President Trump’s direction, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today temporarily suspended a number of rules so that hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities can boost their frontline medical staffs as they fight to save lives during the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

These changes affect doctors, nurses, and other clinicians nationwide, and focus on reducing supervision and certification requirements so that practitioners can be hired quickly and perform work to the fullest extent of their licenses. The new waivers sharply expand the workforce flexibilities CMS announced on March 30.

CMS sets and enforces essential quality and safety standards for the nation’s healthcare system that supplement State scope-of-practice and licensure laws for healthcare workers. CMS has continuously examined its regulations to identify areas where Federal requirements may be more stringent than State laws and requirements. The changes CMS is announcing today will ensure that healthcare facilities across the nation can expand their staffs and organize them in the most efficient way possible to handle the incoming surge of COVID-19 patients.
Hospitals and health systems throughout the U.S. are seeing increases in patient volumes, leading to significant challenges in delivering vital services. Allowing clinicians to practice to the full scope of their licenses is critical to address staffing needs during the public health emergency.

As a result of CMS’s action:

Doctors can now directly care for patients at rural hospitals, across state lines if necessary, via phone, radio, or online communication, without having to be physically present. Remotely located physicians, coordinating with nurse practitioners at rural facilities, will provide staffs at such facilities additional flexibility to meet the needs of their patients.
Nurse practitioners, in addition to physicians, may now perform some medical exams on Medicare patients at skilled nursing facilities so that patient needs, whether COVID-19 related or not, continue to be met in the face of increased care demands.
Occupational therapists from home health agencies can now perform initial assessments on certain homebound patients, allowing home health services to start sooner and freeing home-health nurses to do more direct patient care.
Hospice nurses will be relieved of hospice aide in-service training tasks so they can spend more time with patients.

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