The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is currently reviewing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service’s (CMS) final rule on the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA). The rule addresses CLIA Fees; Histocompatibility, Personnel, and Alternative Sanctions for Certificate of Waiver Laboratories.
When it was first released—as a proposed rule—in 2022, it included CMS’s proposal to allow individuals with a bachelor’s degree in nursing to perform high complexity testing. ASCP led an aggressive advocacy campaign opposing the proposal, which forced CMS to extend the comment deadline.
ASCP’s leadership on this rule secured wide support from the rest of the pathology and laboratory community, and our grassroots advocacy resulted in scores of ASCP members and others submitting more than 20,000 comments on the nursing proposal. If fact, almost 99 percent of the comments CMS received about the proposed rule opposed allowing the bachelor’s degree in nursing to qualify someone to perform high complexity laboratory testing.
At this point, it remains to be seen what is in the final rule and when it will be released. Once it is released, ASCP will provide a full analysis in ePolicy.
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For more information regarding ASCP's advocacy initiatives and policy positions, please contact ASCP's Center for Public Policy at (202) 408-1110.
ASCP ePolicy News is supported by an unrestricted grant from Hologic.
