The Health Policy War Room

On August 2, 2021, CMS placed on display at the Federal Register the final fiscal year 2022 Inpatient Prospective Payment System Final rule. Amongst the over 2,000 pages are CMS's final decisions on New Technology Add-on Payments (NTAP) for FY 2022. The NTAP program was designed to identify new technologies and to ensure that payment under the IPPS would be adequate so that early adopters of  new technologies would not be financially disadvantaged. Under the traditional NTAP pathway, a technology must be considered "new",  the charges of cases involving the technology must be more than 75 percent of the unadjusted rate for the MS-DRG to which the technology is assigned, and the technology must represent a substantial clinical improvement over existing technologies.  Beginning in 2021, CMS implemented an alternative NTAP pathway for technologies granted "break-through" approval by the FDA and for certain antimicrobial products. For this alternative pathway, techn