How Proposed Changes to Medicare Documentation Regs Can Impact Palliative Care

by Amy Davis (@MaximizeQOL)(CMS open to comments until Sep 10, 2018. See end of post for details. - Ed.)Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) hasproposed sweeping reforms to documentation requirements, clinician reimbursement, and the Quality Payment Program (QPP), to begin in 2019. (1) If approved in their current form, the changes are likely to have dramatic net negative effects on outpatient palliative care reimbursement. A detailed review and analysis of all 1,473 pages of the Proposed Rule, plus its addenda, would not be practical here. The reader is referred to thecomplete text (1) andothers ’ assessments (2) reviewing its discussions ofspecific codes, telemedicine, unrelated Relative Value Units (RVUs), the QPP (3), and other issues less directly related to general specialty outpatient palliative care. The sections involving the new documentation and reimbursement paradigm seem poised to have the biggest impacts.Numerous professional organizations have been persistently calling for CMS and other similar stakeholders to eliminate the ever-growing administrative tasks burdening clinicians today that are not meaningfully helping patients. For example, theAmerican College of Physicians ’ initiative (4) has avidly encouraged, among other things, the elimination of duplicative and clinically irrelevant documentation and a focus on those administrative elements demonstrated to have clinically meaningful impact.CMS has listened to this universal outcry and ...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: billing CMS davis The profession Source Type: blogs