CMS on Friday issued a final rule that will provide hospice providers with a 3.1% Medicare payment increase for fiscal year (FY) 2024, higher than the 2.8% reimbursement rate increase proposed in March, in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia.

• Georgia: COVID-19 cases have started to rise again, according to Brendan Jackson, CDC's COVID-19 incident manager. "After roughly six, seven months of steady declines, things are starting to tick back up again," Jackson said. According to Jackson, the amount of coronavirus being detected in wastewater along with the percentage of people testing positive for the virus and the number of people seeking care for COVID-19 at emergency departments all started increasing in July. "This could be the start of a late summer wave," Jackson noted. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the United States is "clearly on the backside" of pandemic surges, "but at the same time, one of the challenges we have is these variants keep changing. And what these changing variants might do and how they might do it is something we haven't anticipated yet." (Stein, NPR, 7/28; Bean, Becker's Clinical Leadership & Infection Control, 7/28)
• Maryland: CMS on Friday issued a final rule that will provide hospice providers with a 3.1% Medicare payment increase for FY 2024, higher than the 2.8% reimbursement rate increase proposed in March. Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO of LeadingAge, a trade association for nonprofit hospice agencies, said the reimbursement increase was inadequate amid inflation. "Even with this increase, conditions on the ground require more support: workforce costs are higher than ever; nurses and aides are scarce; and costs for supplies, drugs, gas, and other expenses are all inflated," she said. (Eastabrook, Modern Healthcare, 7/28)
• Virginia: CMS on Friday announced that hackers had accessed 612,000 Medicare beneficiaries' data, including their Social Security Numbers, medical records, and other information through the MOVEit system used by Maximus, a CMS contractor. In a filing with the Securities Exchange Committee filed Wednesday, Maximus said "at least" 8 to 11 million peoples' data was accessed, most of whom are non-Medicare patients. Maximus became aware of "unusual activity" on May 30 and shut down their system the next day. They informed CMS of the breach on June 2. In a release, CMS said it's still investigating the breach and that it will "take all appropriate actions to safeguard the information entrusted to CMS." (Leonard, PoliticoPRO [subscription required], 7/28)