The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has published final rules related to personnel regulations under CLIA. The proposed rules were published in 2022 and generated thousands of comments back to the agency. The entire community of medical laboratory professionals had a significant impact on the final outcome. “Because of the work of so…
In 2014, Congress passed The Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) to reform the Medicare Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule (CLFS) to a single national fee schedule based on private market data from all types of laboratories. Unfortunately, the first round of data collection in 2017 failed to capture adequate and representative private market data, leaving…
We’re all had enough politics right now, but we have a small opportunity to have a potentially large impact on the financial environment for clinical laboratories in the United States. It will take swift, strong, and forceful action on the part of the clinical laboratory community, even if we’re all tired. Congress has come back…
ASCLS is one of four organizations selected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services (CSELS) to partner with the agency on enhancing clinical laboratory workforce capacity. The three-year cooperative agreement will support CDC’s OneLab Initiative to help build laboratory preparedness and response competencies among clinical laboratory…
In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science (ASCLS) has raised serious objections to a proposed federal rule that would allow individuals with bachelor’s degrees in nursing to serve as high complexity testing personnel under CLIA without any additional training or experience. Noting the proposal…
Earlier today (Tuesday June 14 2022), the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing on S.4348, the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Landmark Advancements (FDASLA) Act, and voted to move the bill to the full Senate for its consideration. This bill includes the current version of the Verifying Accurate, Leading-edge…
Labvocacy efforts to prevent PAMA cuts have generated a new bill in the House of Representatives Rules Committee. Among its provisions, the “Protecting Medicare and American Farmers from Sequester Cuts Act” would delay any cuts under PAMA for one year until January of 2023. This will give the laboratory community time to work on a…
Congress needs to hear your story. Cuts to the Medicare Clinical Laboratory Fee schedule threaten to further erode the precarious finances of America’s clinical laboratories, severely limiting their ability to staff laboratories and pushing an exhausted workforce even further into burnout. These cuts will severely limit access to laboratory services that over 56 million seniors…
Today, the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science (ASCLS) and the Association of Genetic Technologists (AGT) announced the two groups would hold their annual meetings jointly beginning in June 2019 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The partnership was possible after the Society’s decision earlier this year to hold its Annual Meeting independently for the first time…
The laboratory community is being presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to guide the updating of CLIA regulations to reflect the current and future practices in clinical laboratories that support clinical decision-making in an ever-evolving healthcare system. In advance of a March 12, 2018 deadline, CMS is requesting information, comments, information, evidence, research, and trends related to…