You can decline to answer any of it. It's a new incentive for doctors categorized as 'social needs' and it determines if they should give you a free meal or social worker referrals or the like. They are doing the PHQ-9 as well to aks questions to see if they can put you on SSRIs. Just decline to answer - that's the simplest way out of it.
I hate it and work dealing with medical data. I do not go to a doctor that works under CMS stuff, but it also means not covered by insurance. I pretty much doctor myself.
CMS is a nightmare.
CMS is awful. They drive a lot of the questions you get asked at the hospitals/clinics. Just decline and they take you out of the cohort. It sucks that we don't have control of our medical data. We have to send it to sooooo many places. "Oh! It's not selling it, it's for 'research!'"
The questions you are seeing now, though, seem to be related to incentives (monetary to get the docs to do their jobs because they won't otherwise). Part of my job is to dig up the data out of the health records to show that the docs are or are not doing XYZ to get their extra payments. The "Social Needs" is the latest. Just before that was "Depression Screening" (PHQ-2/9 Patient Health Questionnaire which isn't about your health but deciding based on stupid questions whether you should be referred to a head shrinker or just tossed on drugs). Most of these things are designed by CMS or Pfizer.
CMS has made the longterm care business a complete disaster. Many of these facilities are closer to a halfway house than a nursing home.
More time is spent on compliance than actual care.
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