CROWNweb implementation cost data

By Bill Peckham

NephrOnline helpfully provides another letter (PDF link) National Renal Administrators Association president Keith Mentz wrote to CMS. This November 24th letter was:

sent to Barry Straube, MD, the Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, detailing the costs for small- and medium-sized renal providers to submit patient data manually on CMS's CROWNWeb system. The cost data was gathered by the NRAA following its meeting with Straube to discuss concerns with the implementation of the Internet-based data collection system.

The letter shows that I was wrong to say in yesterday's post that there was only silence from CMS, at least CMS will meet with dialysis providers but still CMS's decision making process is opaque. And in this case CMS is proceeding in a dumb way, a way at odds with their commitment to providing healthcare value. The letter does suggest a partial answer to Dori's question - there seems to be a change in contractor and now a new time line - but why could the system handle 70% of the data in an Excel file, i.e. bulk submitted, and not 100%? Odd.

As far as the cost data supplied by the NRAA, the actual cost of paying nurses to do data entry doesn't capture the full lost value of nursing time. The dollar figures understate the value of time that isn't available for patient care. At least from the perspective of the sharp end of the needle. My message to my Congressional Representatives is still that CMS should take take responsibility for their system's inability to accept electronic data from small providers. Keep nurses doing nursing, not data entry.