Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services propose less burdensome telemedicine credentialing rules

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed changes to ease the burdens of credentialing and privileging for hospitals that provide telemedicine.

The proposed rule would revise the conditions of participation (CoPs) for both hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs). It would allow hospitals to rely on information provided from another location to base credentialing and privileging decisions regarding physicians and practitioners that will use telemedicine at their facility. CMS officials said the proposed rule comes because of the current duplicative and burdensome credentialing process that is particularly difficult for small hospitals that lack the resources to conduct a traditional credentialing process for all the providers that may provide telemedicine services at their facilities.