The rollout of a Medicare program that uses artificial intelligence to approve or deny care was hasty and error-ridden, according to more than a thousand pages of recently released documents and data.
The pilot program, called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, or WISeR, launched in January and requires health care providers to seek approvals before they can provide certain procedures and products, like skin substitutes and epidural injections for pain management. The experiment operates in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington and will run until 2031.
Among other issues, the documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that one WISeR vendor warned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that it was unrealistic to expect a working product by the time the federal agency wanted to launch the program.
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