During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday, House Democrats praised proposals in President Obama's fiscal year 2011 budget plan that would modernize CMS' claims collection system and combat health care fraud, NextGov reports.
Under Obama's budget plan, $110 million would be allocated to modernizing the CMS claims system so it is able to analyze and share health care performance information. The upgraded system would allow officials to measure health care quality and link payments to performance.
Obama's budget proposal also calls for $561 million in discretionary funding to combat health care fraud, up from $311 million in fiscal year 2010. According to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, some of the funding would go toward technologies that identify health care fraud by analyzing suspicious patterns in claims data (Sternstein, NextGov, 2/5).