The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is thanking all the colleagues in the renal care community who submitted questions to CMS about the recently released end-stage renal disease (ESRD) conditions for coverage final rule. CMS received a good number of interesting and important questions from you to their ESRD final rule rollout mailbox. In response to these inquiries, CMS has already provided many of you with individual responses to your questions; however, to share the benefit of these questions with the entire community, CMS is working on a “Frequently Asked Questions” document that will condense many of the questions they received through the mailbox. That document will be posted online in the coming weeks—a notification will be issued once it is available for public download.

With the imminent publication of the “Frequently Asked Questions” document, CMS has decided to sunset the ESRD final rule rollout mailbox. As of September 1, 2008, CMS will no longer monitor the mailbox for new questions.

For more information about the new rule, please visit the CMS Web site at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/CFCsAndCoPs/13_ESRD.asp .

If you have an immediate inquiry, please contact Lauren Oviatt at Lauren.Oviatt@cms.hhs.gov.