On December 22, CMS announced the 16 hospitals awarded Medicare-funded DGME and IME positions through Round 16 of the Affordable Care Act’s Section 5506 slot redistribution program. Round 16 redistributed 574.82 DGME and 556.81 IME FTE cap slots from Hahnemann University Hospital, which closed during the summer of 2019.

Section 5506 of the ACA requires CMS to implement the closed hospital residency slot redistribution program. Under the program, CMS is required to take all of the DGME and IME residency slots from hospitals that closed on or after March 23, 2008, and to permanently redistribute them according to certain criteria.

The ACA specifies that hospitals in the same geographic region as the closed hospital are to receive priority for the closed hospital’s slots. Among other criteria, CMS also gave preference in distributing these permanent slots to hospitals that:

• Assumed an entire program from the closed hospital;
• Received slots from the closed hospital under a GME affiliation agreement and would use the slots to continue to train at least the number of residents the hospital had trained under the affiliation agreement; and/or
• Took in residents displaced by the hospital closure and would continue to train residents in the same programs as the displaced residents, even after the displaced residents completed their training.

Applications for Round 16 slots were due on January 30, 2020, and CMS announced the award on the Agency’s GME webpage. The following 16 hospitals were awarded permanent DGME and IME slots, as follows:

91 other hospitals applied for Round 16 slots but were not awarded any.

Awardees of slots from Round 17 (from closed hospital Ohio Valley Medical Center) have not yet been announced.

The GME @ Dentons team is happy to answer any questions you may have about this announcement, the application process for closed hospital slots, or broader inquiries about Medicare funding of graduate medical education.