Sponsors (5)
The bill modernizes and pilots more flexible electronic ACO quality reporting—potentially improving measurement and cutting reporting burden—but does so with modest net reductions to Medicare funding, added implementation costs, reduced formal rulemaking oversight, and risks to transparency and equitable participation.
Medicare beneficiaries and ACO-participating providers: the bill enables use of multiple standard electronic quality measures and a digital reporting pilot, which can produce more timely and comparable performance measurement.
ACO participants and their staff: the bill reduces risk of unfair 'unrepresentative' determinations and cuts other reporting requirements, lowering administrative burden and freeing clinician/administrator time for patient care or implementation.
Selected ACOs and their IT teams: CMS will provide technical assistance to pilot participants, lowering some barriers to adopting digital reporting approaches.
Medicare beneficiaries and the public: allowing omission of data from one or more ACO participants can mask poor performance by excluded providers and reduce transparency when comparing ACOs.
Beneficiaries and stakeholders: permitting implementation via program instruction instead of notice-and-comment rulemaking reduces public input and formal oversight of measurement and reporting policy.
Taxpayers, Medicare, and providers: developing, supporting, and evaluating the five-year pilot and maintaining multiple reporting pathways will create additional federal and provider IT/administrative costs.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Requires multiple accepted quality‑measure submission formats for ACOs (2025–2029), bars deeming data unrepresentative for omitted participant data (from 2026), and creates a 2028–2032 digital measure pilot with $8M funding.
Introduced September 15, 2025 by Vernon G. Buchanan · Last progress July 13, 2026
Requires the Medicare Secretary to accept multiple existing quality-measure collection types for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) for performance years 2025–2029, and prevents the Secretary from deeming ACO-reported quality data unrepresentative solely because one or more ACO participants’ data are omitted beginning for performance years on/after January 1, 2026. Creates a five-year digital quality measure reporting pilot for selected ACOs for performance years 2028–2032, waives other ACO reporting requirements for pilot participants, limits use of pilot data for certain administrative determinations, and requires technical assistance and public reporting on the pilot. Appropriates $8,000,000 in FY2026 (available until expended) to CMS to implement the changes and offsets that appropriation by reducing the Medicare Improvement Fund by $8,000,000 (from $2,062,000,000 to $2,054,000,000) for services furnished during and after FY2027.