The 21st Century Cures Act is a United States law enacted by the 114th United States Congress in December 2016. The Act “is designed to help accelerate medical product development and bring new innovations and advances to patients who need them faster and more efficiently” and it “builds on FDA’s ongoing work to incorporate the perspectives of patients into the development of drugs, biological products, and devices in FDA’s decision-making process.”
The Act is also intended to reduce bureaucratic barriers and facilitate the use of electronic health systems and technology. To that end, states have been required since January 2023 to use electronic visit verification (EVV) for Medicaid-financed home health care services.
But the Act didn’t provide detailed instructions, leaving it up to the states to use, or develop, their own technologies. Agencies delivering services only had to have either a state-approved EVV or their own system in use to upload the data.
Noting the many benefits of EVV—such as incentivized timeliness, record accuracy and online security—many agencies took advantage of the federal mandate’s flexibility and chose to implement…
