Medicare Hospital Inpatient Device-Intensive Payment Policy
February 13, 2025
Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) payment system includes payment policies that support providers’ use of innovative medical device technologies. The continued evolution of these policies is necessary to keep pace with current and future medical innovation. In this report, HMA summarizes models testing the implementation of a newly proposed policy for the hospital inpatient system which aims to eliminate systemic bias that may slow hospitals’ adoption of innovative technologies. HMA concludes that targeted policies that eliminate the use of the hospital wage index to standardize device costs can result in more accurate reimbursement for hospitals and increase beneficiary access to innovative technologies.
