Thank you to all of our colleagues in the renal care community who submitted questions to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) about our recently released ESRD conditions for coverage final rule. In response to these inquiries, we have already provided many of you with individual responses to your questions; however, to share the benefit of these questions with the entire community, CMS has developed a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) document that condenses many of the questions we received from you. The FAQs are available online at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/center/esrd.asp on the CMS Web site. To view them, click FAQs ESRD Rollout Final 082808 .

As another tool to help you understand the new Conditions for Coverage, CMS has developed a crosswalk that compares the former conditions to the final revised conditions, which were issued in the Federal Register on April 15, 2008. The crosswalk will help you navigate the new organization structure of the condition as well as some revised provisions of the conditions themselves. To access the crosswalk, click ESRD Conditions Crosswalk Final 080408 .

We hope you find these tools helpful as you work to implement the revised conditions. For more information, please visit us online at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/CFCsAndCoPs/13_ESRD.asp on the CMS Web site.