As part of its efforts to give healthcare providers greater flexibility to respond to the rapidly growing public health emergency, on March 30, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an initiative called “hospitals without walls,” which is an unprecedented array of temporary waivers to allow hospitals to expand treatment capacity outside their hospital walls in response to the patient surge resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. The CMS waivers are effective retroactively to March 1, 2020, and continue for the duration of the COVID-19 national health emergency. Continue reading >