CMS has proposed to increase the work relative value units assigned to the Medicare Evaluation and Management codes for more than 400 services. The work component for RVUs associated with an intermediate office visit--the most commonly billed physician’s service--will increase by 37%, for example, and a visit requiring moderately complex decision making will increase by 29% in an office setting and by 31% in the hospital. “We expect that improved payments for evaluation and management services will result in better outcomes, because physicians will get financial support for giving patients the help they need to manage illnesses more effectively,” said CMS Administrator Mark McClellan in a press release. The changes, which CMS estimates will increase expenditures by approximately $4 billion, reflect the recommendations of the RVS Update Committee of the American Medical Association.
CMS is also proposing changes to the way Medicare calculates the practice expense portion of physician fee schedule payments. The proposed change would make the practice expense methodology more transparent, easier to understand, and consistent across procedures, and would use data that have been collected by specialty societies and reviewed by the AMA RUC. If adopted, the RVU revisions would be fully implemented on or after Jan. 1, 2007, while the practice expense revisions would be phased in over a four-year period.
