Department of Health and Human Services January 14, 2015 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or we) has made available for public review and comment the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposed rule establishing standards for the growing, harvesting, packing, and holding of produce for human consumption. The document is available in Docket No. FDA-2014-N-2244. FDA is also announcing a public meeting to discuss the Draft EIS. The purpose of the public meeting is to inform the public of the findings in the Draft EIS, to provide information about the EIS process (including how to submit comments, data, and other information to the docket), to solicit oral stakeholder and public comments on the Draft EIS, and to provide clarification, as needed, about the contents of the Draft EIS.

This document extends the comment period for the Payment for Physician and Other Health Care Professional Services Purchased by Indian Health Programs and Medical Charges Associated with Non- Hospital-Based Care proposed rule, which was published in the Federal Register on December 5, 2014. The comment period for the proposed rule, which would have ended on January 20, 2015, is extended to February 4, 2015.

Through the ``Innovations in Measuring and Managing Addiction Treatment Quality'' Challenge (the ``Challenge''), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), challenges the general public to make concrete advances toward improving the quality of addiction treatment. Specifically, through this Challenge, NIDA hopes to incentivize the development of innovative concepts for quality measurement and quality management systems based on the latest science of addiction and its treatment and of quality measurement and management. These new concepts would be game-changing because they would go beyond current performance measurement concepts in that they would not be limited by the data commonly available in current provider and payer data systems. Instead, they would (a) more directly reflect the clinical effects that can and should be expected from high-quality addiction treatment; (b) capture what clinicians and provider organizations need to measure to help them provide high-quality addiction treatment; and (c) provide a solid basis for measuring clinician and provider performance that may be used by patients and other purchasers to select and incent high-quality treatment. NIDA believes that the development of such quality measures and management systems has the potential to meaningfully improve the quality of addiction treatment both by giving clinicians and providers the information they need to assess and improve the quality of the care they provide and by providing tools patients and purchasers can use to shop for the highest quality providers, allowing market forces to provide another incentive for improvement.