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Following a July 2 deadline, CMS is going through nominations for potential members who will serve on the DME Program Advisory and Oversight Committee (PAOC). As mandated by the Medicare Modernization Act, the committee will advise the agency on quality and financial standards, data collection strategies and, ultimately, logistics behind the implementation of competitive bidding for DME.
“We received a lot of [nominations] during the last hour — a huge stack of them,” a CMS official said. “It will take awhile to get through them all.” He added that at the time the total number of applications the agency received had not been tallied, and that a date had not yet been set for the final selection of committee members. “We're just gathering names. [The selection process] has to move up many more levels,” he said.
The official did say that members will be selected “in plenty of time” for the committee's first meeting in October. Before that, though, the committee membership must be approved by the CMS administrator's office as well as HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's office. In the weeks leading up to the deadline, parties from HME sectors including providers, manufacturers, associations and others scrambled to line up congressional “sponsors” for their bids to committee slots.
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