On August 27, the American Medical Association and about 170 other medical groups including the American Academy of Family Physicians, sent a letter to Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, regarding the administration’s proposals included in the 2019 Medicare physician payment rule.
The full text of the letter appears below:
Dear Administrator Verma:
The undersigned organizations representing physicians and other health professionals welcome and strongly support the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “Patients Over Paperwork” initiative. We appreciate your outreach to our community and are solidly behind your goal of reducing administrative burdens for physicians and other health care professionals so that they can devote more time to patient care. The proposals included in the 2019 Medicare physician payment rule demonstrate that you listened to our members’ concerns about the significant administrative burdens due to the documentation requirements associated with Evaluation and Management (E/M) services. We are grateful for your efforts to simplify these requirements and reduce their associated red tape.
- Changing the required documentation of the patient’s history to focus only on the interval history since the previous visit;
- Eliminating the requirement for physicians to re-document information that has already been documented in the patient’s record by practice staff or by the patient; and
- Removing the need to justify providing a home visit instead of an office visit.
Implementation of these policies will streamline documentation requirements, reduce note bloat, improve workflow, and contribute to a better environment for health care professionals and their Medicare patients.
Regarding the proposal to collapse payment rates for eight office visit services for new and established patients down to two each, the undersigned organizations believe there are a number of unanswered questions and potential unintended consequences that would result from the coding policies in the proposed rule. We oppose the implementation of this proposal because it could hurt physicians and other health care professionals in specialties that treat the sickest patients, as well as those who provide comprehensive primary care, ultimately jeopardizing patients’ access to care. We also urge that the new multiple service payment reduction policy in the proposed rule not be adopted as the issue of multiple services on the same day of service was factored into prior valuations of the affected codes. The proposal also has significant impact on certain services, such as chemotherapy administration, that may be an unintended consequence of altering the current practice expense methodology to accommodate the proposal.
The medical community wants to help CMS work through the complicated issues surrounding the appropriate coding, payment, and documentation requirements for different levels of E/M services. Toward that end, the undersigned organizations strongly support the American Medical Association’s creation of a workgroup of physicians and other health professionals with deep expertise in defining and valuing codes, and who also use the office visit codes to describe and bill for services provided to Medicare patients. The charge to this workgroup is to analyze the E/M coding and payment issues in order to arrive at concrete solutions that can be provided to CMS in time for implementation in the 2020 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. A number of CMS personnel monitored the initial conversations of the workgroup and we look forward to their active participation in this process going forward.
We encourage the administration to adopt in the final rule the documentation changes outlined above. These changes reflect significant progress in your Patients Over Paperwork Initiative. Such policy modifications will significantly reduce the documentation burden so health care professionals can spend more time with patients. We also urge the administration to set aside its office visit and multiple service proposals, fully embrace the assistance of the workgroup and work together with the medical community on a mutually agreeable policy that will achieve our shared goal of simplifying E/M documentation burdens while mitigating any unintended consequences.