ARTICLE SUMMARY:
CMS published its 2025 payment rules November 1, including some positive policies for pain management devices and prescription digital therapeutics for mental health.
One important path to finding new medtech markets is developing devices that might offer a more targeted or safer alternative to drug therapies. Reimbursement policies, which tend to reflect well-established treatment methods, can often stand in the way of this type of market transition in clinical areas where drugs, traditionally, are the only treatment option. But CMS finalized two policies November 1 that help give medtech tools a foothold in drug-dominated clinical arenas.
Those policies—one intended to help fight the opioid epidemic and the other part of a broader effort to improve mental health care—came amid thousands of pages of rulemaking published by the Medicare agency to establish payment rates and frameworks for large swaths of the healthcare system next calendar year.
