Category: Physician Finances

Every year at this time, physician practice administrators hold their breath and wait for the annual relative value unit (RVU) revaluations by Medicare. This year, Medicare was delayed in releasing the “final rule” that dictates how physicians will be paid and the final report was not released until earlier this month (December 2020). As in past years, some specialties will have increased revenue and some will have decreased revenue. Here is the projections for the RVU changes in 2021.

So, why are there so much differences between specialties? There are two reasons. First, with the 2021 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, the evaluation and management codes for outpatient visits were revised with a result that office visits are more highly valued than in the past. Medicare is required to keep overall physician reimbursement constant so when outpatient visits were more highly valued, other procedures and services necessarily had to be lower valued. Therefore, those specialties associated with a lot of outpatient office visits will see an overall increase in their Medicare payments. For this reason, endocrinology, rheumatology, hematology/oncology, and family practice will all see double digit increases from Medicare

Procedure-oriented specialties such as surgical specialties will see a decrease in Medicare payments. Because of the increase in RVUs associated with outpatient E/M codes, the Medicare “conversion factor” (the amount that Medicare pays physicians per RVU) will drop from $36.09 to $32.41 in order to stay budget neutral. Overall, this translates to physicians getting paid 10% less per RVU in 2021 than in 2020. Therefore specialties with no E/M billing (such as pathology and radiology) will see a significant drop in income and surgical specialties that have most of their RVUs from surgical procedures and have a lower percentage of their RVUs from E/M billing will also see a drop in income.

Every year, different physician specialty societies lobby for increasing their own specialties’ compensation. In that sense, doctors as a profession are a group of competing special interests.

For physicians in solo or small group private practice, a decrease in total RVUs has the biggest impact on physician income since those physicians still have the same overhead expenses in 2021 as they had in 2020. If that overhead expense is half of total revenue, then a 10% drop in total revenue can translate to a 20% drop in physician income. Therefore, radiologists and pathologists in solo or small group private practices will see the biggest drop in take-home income. I anticipate that in this group, there will be increasing pressure to become hospital-employed next year as a consequence of the significant drop in private practice income.

For physicians who are hospital-employed, a decrease in the work RVU has the biggest impact on physician income since those physicians typically have the work RVU as the measure of productivity by which the hospital bases their income. Therefore, critical care physicians, anesthesiologists, and radiologists who are hospital-employed will see the greatest drop in their income.

The annual changes in physician reimbursement has a big financial impact on current physicians but also has a quieter impact on future physicians. As medical students see changes in compensation among specialties, the invisible hand of capitalism will affect the decision about which specialties those students choose to enter. One way of assessing medical student interest in different specialties in in the National Residency Match Program data. In the 2020 residency and fellowship match, the specialties with the lowest fill rates were nephrology (62%,), geriatrics (50%), and infectious disease (79%). Specialties with the highest fill rates were radiology (98%), dermatology (98%), otolaryngology (99%), plastic surgery (100%), and thoracic surgery (100%). In the future, we can expect students to be drawn to those specialties that have an increasing reimbursement and away from those with lower reimbursement.

American medicine is not a free market economy. Each year, Medicare can have a big impact on the compensation among different specialties as well as the interest in students entering those specialties, simply by changing the RVU valuations and the conversion factor. In 2021, we will see some of the biggest changes in recent years.

December 23, 2020

I’m taking a break from rounding in the ICU this afternoon while waiting for 3 of my patients’ COVID-19 test results to come back. And I was trying to think of anything good that has come from the financial melt-down that has occurred over the past month. There is at least one small opportunity that the sudden drop in value of the stock market presents, namely, the opportunity to convert your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA with less negative tax implications.

Physicians are generally not able to contribute directly to a Roth IRA because they have too high of income. However, physicians (or anyone) can contribute to a traditional IRA with after-tax dollars. In a previous post, I outlined why I believe that traditional IRAs are an unwise investment option for most physicians. However, many physicians (and other people) have traditional IRAs that they have accumulated when rolling over a pension plan into an IRA. This often happens when changing employment and leaving one employer’s pension plan to join another plan.

I have been a long-standing proponent of annually contributing to a traditional IRA and then shortly thereafter, moving the money in that traditional IRA into a Roth IRA, a process called a Roth conversion. This is also called the “backdoor Roth”. In the past, the only mechanism for contributing to a Roth IRA was by people who have annual incomes less than $124,000 ($196,000 if filing jointly in 2020) contributing directly to the Roth with pre-tax dollars. However, several years ago, a law governing Roth contributions expired, allowing anyone (regardless of income) to “convert” a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. This now allows a person making more than $124,000 to contribute to a traditional IRA with post-tax dollars then convert that traditional IRA into a Roth IRA.

The advantage of the Roth IRA is that it grows in value tax-free and then when you take the money out, you don’t have to pay any taxes on it. I believe that the Roth IRA is an important component of a diversified portfolio of retirement investments.

One consequence of converting a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA is that you have to pay regular income tax on increase in value of the traditional IRA at the time of conversion. So, if you originally contributed $2,000 to a traditional IRA and it increases in value to $3,000, then when you convert it to a Roth IRA, you have to pay regular income tax on the appreciation value of $1,000. Other than doing an annual “back door Roth” conversion, there are two times that it is smart to convert a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA: (1) when your income tax rate is low and (2) when the stock market crashes.

As I have stated in previous posts, my philosophy to retirement planning is to be able to have enough retirement savings that when you retire, you can withdraw enough out of your retirement funds to equal your current income. If you are successful with that, then you are not going to be in a lower tax bracket when you retire so option (1) for traditional IRA to Roth IRA conversions will not be possible. The COVID-19 outbreak and its effect on the world’s stock markets makes option (2) now very appealing.

When we changed our physician practice corporation in the early 2000’s, I rolled my former corporation’s pension plan into a traditional IRA. In 2009, the stock market dropped precipitously and I used that as an opportunity to convert about half of my traditional IRA into a Roth, thus minimizing the amount of income tax that I had to pay at the time of conversion. Over the next several years, the stock market regained all of its losses and then continued to grow in value so when I retire and take money out of my Roth IRA, I won’t have to pay any taxes on all of that increase in IRA value.

Over the past month, the stock market has fallen by about a third of its value. Consequently, most people’s traditional IRAs have fallen to their lowest value in many years. As a physician, I know that epidemics eventually pass and COVID-19 will eventually go the way of all other previous human epidemics. When that happens, the economy will get back into gear and the stock market will rise again. Therefore, this may be one of the best times in years to convert a traditional IRA into a Roth since you will pay considerably less in income tax on the conversion now than you would pay on withdrawals from the IRA in retirement.

One small silver lining an a sky otherwise full of dark gray COVID-19 clouds

March 21, 2020

Beginning in January 2019, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rolled out G2012 – a new CPT code for “Brief communication technology-based service (virtual check-in)”. This code can be used for patient phone calls as well as electronic medical record patient portal contacts initiated by a patient. For the first time, doctors can charge for patient phone calls – but should they?

The details behind G2012 are that the physician cannot have seen the patient for a regular billable encounter for 7 days prior to the phone/portal encounter or for 24 hours after the phone/portal encounter. The medical discussion should be between 5 – 10 minutes and has to be between the patient and the doctor/NP/PA and not the office staff. The patient has to give verbal consent acknowledging that the telephone/portal visit will be billed. The patient must have been seen by the physician or a physician in the physician’s group within the past 3 years. This CPT code is compensated at 0.41 RVUs ($14.78 for Medicare).

When Medicare released its plans to roll out G2012 a year ago, physicians all over the country breathed a sigh of relief and said “…finally!”. Every physician who is responsible for direct patient care in the outpatient setting knows the burden of patient phone calls. On a typical Monday, I have 15-20 phone messages in my electronic medical record “in basket”. On a Monday after a holiday weekend, that number can increase to 25-30 and it is not uncommon for me to spend 1-2 hours on those Mondays just returning phone calls. It has been estimated that the average primary care practice gets 21 calls per day for every 1,000 patients in the practice.

There are additional CPT codes that are designated for phone calls of various lengths of time for physicians (99441, 99442, and 99443) as well as for advanced practice providers such as NPs or PAs (98966, 98967, and 98968). However, Medicare does not currently reimburse these codes so they are generally not used unless a commercial insurance company recognizes them. Similarly, there is a CPT code for email responses to patients for physicians (99444) and advanced practice providers (98969) but these are also not currently reimbursed by Medicare.

Some phone calls are entirely legitimate, for example, a person who gets an asthma flare when traveling out of town and needs advice and a new inhaler. But some phone calls are simply because a patient does not want to come into the office or a patient wants to avoid an office visit co-pay. In these situations, the physician is providing free healthcare to the patient. And that equates to uncompensated physician time as well as malpractice vulnerability. There are pros and cons to billing for phone calls.

Pros

1. It can reduce overall healthcare costs. The office overhead expense associated with a face-to-face office visit can be considerable. As opposed to a regular office visit, there is no need for registration staff, nursing staff, office space use, and checkout staff with a phone call.
2. It allows more flexible use of the physician’s time. The doctor can return that call at a time when he/she has a few free minutes rather than committing the doctor to a fixed appointment time for an office visit.
3. It is more convenient for the patient. Having a medical problem managed by a phone call can obviate the cost of travel to the doctor’s office and the time involved in getting to and from the doctor’s office. For the patient who is a student or who is working, it also obviates the need to take time away from classes or time off work to go to the doctor’s office.
4. It improves doctor satisfaction. Physicians have provided free medical care over the phone ever since phones came into existence. Knowing that you are getting paid something (even if not very much) can eliminate that sense of being taken advantage of that you otherwise would have. From my perspective, this is one of the most important reasons to bill for patient phone calls.
5. It can create a barrier for patients who abuse the system. Every physician who practices outpatient medicine has had the last minute cancelation by a patient who then calls the office an hour later asking if the doctor can call them back and manage by phone the medical problem that they were supposed to come in for. The physician still has to pay the overhead cost of that no-show on the schedule in terms of the nurse’s salary, office rent, the receptionist’s salary, and the the utility bills not to mention the physician’s own salary. Every physician also has the patient who sends lengthy messages via the EMR patient portal on a daily basis or calls multiple times a week. The awareness that the patient (or at least their insurance) will be billed for those calls can reduce abuse.
6. It encourages use of email communications through patient portals. Phone calls create more overhead expense than emails. There is the time the office staff takes to answer and transcribe patient messages, the time it takes someone to answer the phone when the physician calls back, the time it takes for the patient to actually get on the phone, the time it takes the physician to document the call in the medical record, etc. An email communication eliminates much of that overhead cost of office staff and physician time. Furthermore, when the patient has the doctor on the phone (as opposed to an email message), it often results in additional medical questions that follow the comment: “Oh, and while I have you on the phone…” and this adds additional time as well as complexity of medical decision making. I can answer 3 patient emails in the time it takes me to return 1 patient phone call.

Cons

1. The patient has a co-pay. Although the reality is that at $2.50, it is a bargain. Nevertheless, for patients used to getting free medical advice over the phone, the co-pay can be surprising.
2. The patient has to give verbal permission/acknowledgement that the phone call will be billed. The easiest way to do this is to incorporate scripting into the nurse or office staff who initially answers the phone and starts the phone message.
3. Phone calls do not pay much. The cost of your revenue cycle department to submit and collect the phone call bill may be nearly the $14.78 you will be paid by Medicare for the phone call.
4. It is not usually covered by commercial insurance. Usually, it takes commercial insurance companies a year or two to catch up to new CPT codes introduced by Medicare. Currently, few insurance companies cover phone calls so the patient may be charged the full amount. This can result in patient dissatisfaction (although it can be a deterrent to patients who abuse phone availability).
5. The phone call must be for analysis or decision making that requires the physician. In other words, you should not be billing for a patient phone call that is simply to request to reschedule an upcoming office visit. It is the physician’s time that must be > 5 minutes and not the nurse’s time or the office staff’s time.
6. The phone call must be at least 5 minutes. It only takes 1-2 minutes to send in a prescription refill and so it would be difficult to justify billing for a phone call simply to request a refill. However, for a patient with a COPD exacerbation, by the time the doctor reviews the patient’s past history in the chart, takes an interval history over the phone, checks for allergies, reviews the current medication list for potential drug interactions, sends a prescription for an antibiotic and prednisone to the pharmacy, and then documents the telephone encounter, it almost always takes at least 5 minutes. Be sure that the time spent on the encounter is documented in the medical record. Because Medicare auditors can audit time stamps in the electronic medical record, the amount of time between the physician initially opening the telephone encounter in the EMR until the time the physician closes that encounter must be > 5 minutes.
7. It creates a disincentive for the patient to come into the office. Although it is true that you can practice a lot of medicine over the phone or over the internet, sometimes a physical examination is essential, even if just to get an accurate set of vital signs. Moreover, it becomes more difficult to arrange a needed EKG, a pulmonary function test, a chest x=ray, or blood tests when you are managing a patient over the phone as opposed to the patient being in the office where those tests are readily available in the office. If patients believes that they can get just as good of medical care with a phone call as they can by a face-to-face office visit, then they may stop coming into the office. Not only can this have the potential to jeopardize high quality care, but since the reimbursement for telephone calls is so low compared to an office visit, physicians who do nothing but phone calls all day long will soon go out of business.

When used appropriately, billing for phone calls is a win-win-win. The patient wins by getting their medical problem addressed without having to take the time involved in going to the doctor’s office or the emergency room. The insurance company wins because that $14.78 phone call can often avoid a much more expensive trip to the ER or an urgent care facility. The doctor wins because she/he now gets paid at least something with the psychological benefit to the doctor being worth considerably more than the financial benefit.

December 1, 2019

We have been living in an era of incredibly low inflation rates. In fact, for the past decade, the inflation rate has been the lowest in U.S. history since the 1930’s and has averaged only 1.77% per year since 2010. But economic history teaches us that inflation rates will inevitably rise in the future and when they do, that rise will be especially harmful to physicians.

In the year that I started medical school, 1980, the inflation rate was an astounding 13.5%! Along with high inflation came high interest rates – in April 1980, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was more than 16%. Inflation means that the cost of goods and services goes up. Inflation is often measured by the consumer price index, which is derived from the cost of 8,018 items weighted for the amount of each of those items purchased by consumers the previous month. Inflation is heterogeneous in that the cost of some items will rise more than other items thus affecting some groups of people differently. For example, if the cost of gasoline preferentially increases, then the independent long-haul trucker will be affected more than the person who works from home and does not drive a car. Alternatively, if the cost of food preferentially increases, then the family with 4 teenagers will be affected more than the empty nesters who live next door.

Overall, when the cost of goods and services increase, the average worker’s wage generally increases in tandem. The group that gets hurt the worst with inflation is people with a fixed income, for example, retirees living off of pensions or Social Security. But because of the the way healthcare financing works in the United States, doctors are also ultimately on a fixed income.

The reason is that about 64% of U.S. healthcare spending comes from governmental sources – mainly Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program). Physician payments for most of these governmental sources are tied to the Medicare Conversion Factor which is the amount of money that doctors get paid per RVU (relative value unit). When inflation rises, the Medicare Conversion Factor does not keep up. In the graph, we can see the effect of inflation compared to the change in the Medicare Conversion Factor since 1998. So, for example, in 1998, the conversion factor was $36.69/RVU and remained relatively stagnant for the next 20 years so that by 2019, the conversion factor was $36.04/RVU. On the other hand, goods and services that cost $36.69 in 1998 cost $58.46 in 2019 due to increases in the consumer price index (inflation). In other words, doctors get paid about the same to do a given medical service in 2019 as they did in 1998 but the cost of all of the goods and services that doctors purchase has increased by 62%!

Despite the static conversion factor, doctor’s incomes have increased since 1998 and kept up with inflation. There are three main reasons for this. (1) There has been a shift toward optimizing physician work efficiency by improving office workflows and improving hospital throughput; this has resulted in physicians being able to increase patient volumes. (2) Computerization of medical practice has also improved efficiency and physician work output; this has also resulted in increased patient volumes per workday. (3) There has been a shift from physicians being self-employed to being hospital-employed with hospitals now subsidizing physician salaries.

These three things have allowed physician income to rise but will they be able to keep up with inflation in the future? Most physicians would say that they are currently at the limit of the number of outpatients that they can see in a day. Most hospitalists would say that they are at the limit of the number of patients they can take care of during a hospital shift. Most hospitals have streamlined operating room throughput so that surgeons would say that they cannot do many more surgical operations on a given day. In other words, gains from increased operational efficiency of medical practice cannot be further increased in the future. And that means that in the future, cost of living increases in physician incomes will have to come from greater subsidization rather than greater revenue from clinical care.

Inevitably, with subsidization comes loss of autonomy. And if/when the inflation rate increases, the degree of subsidization will likely increase since there is no reason to expect that the Medicare Conversion Factor is going to increase based on the precedent of the last 20 years. Fortunately, there are a few things physicians can do to protect themselves from inflation:

1. Invest. Except for the decade of 2000-2009 (the “great recession”), the increased value of stocks has outpaced the rate of inflation every decade for the past century. Although there can be considerable year-to-year fluctuations in stock market returns compared to the consumer price index, over time, the stock market always beats inflation. Given that physicians have relatively high incomes compared to the U.S. average worker, one of the best hedges against inflation for physicians is to invest and invest early in one’s career.
2. Have a good electronic medical record and use it efficiently. It is said that “A cheap tool is an expensive tool”, essentially meaning that you get what you pay for and electronic medical records (EMRs) are no exception. An inexpensive EMR that does not improve physician efficiency will result in lower net physician income over time compared to an expensive EMR that allows physicians to perform documentation in less time. Moreover, the EMR is evolving from a computerized patient documentation system to a computerized patient management system by incorporating decision-making algorithms and artificial intelligence into the EMR program. Therefore, your EMR should not just make your documentation more efficient, it needs to make your patient management more efficient.
3. Incorporate industrial engineering principles into office practice. A high-functioning factory is one where there is a minimum of unnecessary motions made by the workers, workers are properly trained to perform their assigned tasks, workers have the right tools they need to perform each task, and each employee works at the top of their skillset. By optimizing office practice efficiency, physicians can reduce overhead expenses, reduce billing costs, improve patient throughput, and reduce patients no-shows & cancelations. Together, these process improvements can reduce the amount of each RVU that goes towards overhead expense and increase the amount that goes toward physician income.
4. Develop mutually beneficial financial relationships with hospitals. Currently, there are more physicians employed by hospitals than in physician-owned practices. This is even more pronounced for younger physicians – 70% of doctors under age 40 are employed by hospitals and this portends a future where few physicians will be self-employed. Physician-hospital partnerships that result in lower length-of-stay, lower readmission rates, lower pharmacy charges, and higher patient satisfaction will be more mutually financially lucrative in the long run – a hospital with a larger positive financial margin can afford to subsidize its physicians more than a hospital with a lower financial margin.
5. Advocate for contractionary monetary policy when economically indicated. When consumers have too much money to spend, inflation occurs. A government can reduce spending by enacting contractionary monetary policy that takes cash out of circulation and moves that cash back to the government and banks. There are essentially three tools a government has to do this: (1) Increase interest rates – this is primarily done by interest rate decisions made by the Federal Reserve Board. (2) Increase the reserve requirements which is the amount of money banks are required to maintain on reserve when making loans – this is also determined by the Federal Reserve Board. (3) Reduce money supply by increasing government bond rates and by increasing income tax rates. Most Americans have a visceral distain for higher interest rates and higher income taxes but sometimes these are necessary to rein in out of control inflation.

It has been nearly 30 years since the annual inflation rate exceeded 4% and consequently most physicians have never experienced the effect of high inflation rates. When it comes to inflation in the future, the saying “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” is good advice for physicians. In the event of unexpectedly high inflation, physicians would likely see a decline in their relative income compared to other professionals.

November 24, 2019

The computer engineering geniuses at Apple have done it again. They’ve created yet another device that I’m probably going to have to buy. The new Apple Watch (series 4) has the ability for anyone to monitor their EKG (sort of). But what are we as physicians going to do with this data? Most electronic medical records permit patients to upload images to their patient portals for their physicians to have access to. Inevitably, some patients will overuse this system – some physicians are already drowning in dozens of Apple Watch rhythm strips being submitted by a single patient. But even for the patient who sends in a single suspicious rhythm strip, if the physician is going to make a clinical decision based on the strip, what are the implications? So, this presents several questions for physicians.

What is it?

The Apple Watch 4 can monitor the heart rhythm in two ways. First, it can measure the regularity of the heart beat by essentially taking the patient’s pulse; this can be reported as regular or irregular. Second, it can measure a single lead EKG reading and it is this latter feature that is really innovative. All EKGs are done by positioning 2 electrodes on different parts of the body and then measuring the electrical signal between those electrodes. A full EKG uses 12 electrodes and produces 12 different wave forms, or leads. The first three of these leads are the limb leads I – III. Lead I measures the signal between the left arm and right arm. Lead II is between the left leg and right arm. Lead III is between the left leg and left arm. The problem with a watch is that an electrode sensor on the back of the watch only has contact with one arm but by placing a second electrode sensor on the knob of the watch, a person can touch that second electrode with a finger from the other arm, thus generating a lead I EKG tracing by having an electrode in contact with both the left and the right arms simultaneously.

What can it tell you?

Since the Apple Watch can only generate a single lead EKG, there are limitations about the amount of information it can provide. For example, you cannot diagnose a myocardial infarction from only one lead (you need all 12). The main information that the lead I tracing will give you is whether the patient is in sinus rhythm or atrial fibrillation. Apple claims that the Apple Watch is 98.3% sensitive and 99.6% specific for classifying atrial fibrillation. However, 12.2% of rhythms could not be classified by the Apple Watch EKG app. Although Apple only mentions atrial fibrillation on its marketing materials for the Apple Watch 4, any physician who looks at telemetry monitor strips in the hospital knows that there are other important rhythm abnormalities that can be identified from a single lead EKG tracing.

What should you do if the patient uploads a rhythm strip?

Although we all get trained in EKG interpretation in medical school, most physicians are not credentialed to read 12-lead EKGs. In most hospitals, physicians must apply for hospital privileges to interpret EKGs and generally, this will be limited to cardiologists; in smaller hospitals, it may be a general internist who has EKG interpretation privileges. Reading an Apple Watch rhythm strip is considerably less complicated than reading a full 12-lead EKG but nevertheless, physicians should know their own limits as to whether they can confidently identify atrial fibrillation (or some other abnormal rhythm) by a rhythm strip. So, for example, if you are a podiatrist or dermatologist and do not normally look at heart rhythm strips, you may want to tell the patient who uploads an Apple Watch rhythm strip to your electronic medical record that EKG interpretation is not part of your normal practice and that they should check with one of their other physicians. However, most primary care physicians are trained in the recognition of atrial fibrillation.

Can you bill for review of the rhythm strip?

The short answer is in 2018, no but in 2019… maybe. Lets take a look at the CPT code possibilities for Apple Watch rhythm interpretation.

1. CPT code 93010 (Medicare reimbursement about $8.50). This is the CPT code for interpretation of a 12-lead EKG if someone else (usually the hospital) owns the EKG machine. It requires an order from a physician and a written interpretation. Since an Apple Watch rhythm strip is only 1 lead and since it is done by the patient’s initiation and not by the physician’s order, CPT 93010 cannot be used.
2. CPT code 93042 (Medicare reimbursement about $7.00). This is the CPT code for rhythm strip interpretation of 1-3 leads of EKG tracings. Like the previous CPT code, this requires an order from a physician and a written interpretation. Although it is conceivable that 93042 could be used to bill for Apple Watch rhythm strip interpretation, I would be hesitant to bill it since the patient is submitting the strip without a physician order.
3. CPT code G2010 (Medicare reimbursement about $6.50). This is the new CPT code for “Remote Evaluation of Pre-Recorded Patient Information” that was created as part of the 2019 Medicare physician fee schedule. This was designed for video or images such as photos of a rash, etc. that a patient creates and then sends to the physician for review. There are several restrictions when billing this CPT code, however. The physician doing the review of the pre-recorded information cannot have seen the patient for a regular evaluation & management encounter within the previous 7 days or within 24 after reviewing the images. Also, the physician has to interpret the image and communicate the findings to the patient within 24 business hours. We will not know for sure if Medicare carriers will accept CPT code G2010 for Apple Watch rhythm interpretation until the new fee schedule goes into effect after January 1, 2019 and we start submitting bills for it; however, it would seem like this CPT code would be the best fit.

Who should get one?

Since the main thing the Apple Watch EKG app does is tell whether there is atrial fibrillation, it will primarily be useful for patients at risk of atrial fibrillation or with a history of previous atrial fibrillation. Better identification of patients with intermittent atrial fibrillation really could save lives since about 15% of all strokes are the result of untreated atrial fibrillation. My suspicion is that a lot of other people with occasional PACs or PVC (premature atrial/ventricular contractions) will also be uploading rhythm strips to understand why they have occasional subjective “skipped heartbeats”. Although not designed for PAC or PVC identification, this could be a side benefit of the app. Similarly, ventricular arrhythmias such as non-sustained ventricular tachycardia may be identifiable. Bradycardic rhythms such as sinus bradycardia and various forms of heart block (1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd degree) may be identifiable. Even if these rhythms cannot be diagnosed with complete certainty, the tracings from the Apple Watch EKG app may be suspicious enough for the physician to direct the patient to seek medical attention where a full 12-lead EKG or a 24-Holter monitor can be performed.

I’ve never had atrial fibrillation or any kind of heart problem. So, am I going to get an Apple Watch 4 with an EKG app… well, yeah, probably.

December 20, 2018

Last week, CMS released the final rule for the 2019 Medicare Physician fee schedule. The initial proposed fee schedule was released last summer and would have radically changed the way that physicians are paid for outpatient clinical practice. There was a lot of criticism of the proposed fee schedule with most professional medical societies opposing it. To give CMS credit, they listened to the critics and modified the fee schedule accordingly. The end result is that not much will change in how physicians are paid next year.

At the core, the proposed fee schedule was going to establish a single CPT code for all new patient visits with a physician and a single code for all return patient visits with a physician. Thus, the current CPT codes 99202 – 99205 (new patient visits level 2 – 5) would be collapsed into a single CPT code. Similarly, the current CPT codes 99212 – 99215 (return patient visits level 2 – 5) would be collapsed into a single CPT code. The advantage of this is that it would have reduced documentation requirements, therefore reducing physician work. The disadvantage is that physicians would be paid the same amount for seeing and caring for a new patient with a cold as they would for seeing a patient with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Therefore, physicians who mainly take care of relatively simple medical problems would be winners whereas physicians who take care of a lot of complex medical problems would be losers. Since my outpatient practice is primarily limited to interstitial lung disease (a complex medial problem), I estimated that my total Medicare income would drop by 12%. In the outpatient world, about half of total income goes toward overhead expense and half goes toward paying the doctor – since overhead expenses would not change and would still have to be paid, the net effect of a 12% reduction in total Medicare revenue is that my personal income from seeing Medicare patients would drop by 24%.

After realizing this unintended consequence of the proposed 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, CMS decided to leave the current level 2 – 5 new and outpatient CPT codes in place and not consolidate them into single codes… at least for now. Instead, CMS plans to institute a revised version of this plan in 2021. The revised plan will consolidate level 2 – 4 outpatient visits into a single CPT code and leave the level 5 outpatient visit CPT code. Thus, instead of being 4 outpatient billing levels for physicians, there would only be 2 outpatient billing levels. The advantage is that there would less documentation requirements for all of the the lower level visits, thus freeing physicians from what is seen as a lot of unnecessary documentation in progress notes that requires a lot of physician time but adds nothing to the care of the patient.

The proposed 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule would have also significantly reduced payment to podiatrists. However, the final schedule did not change podiatry reimbursement.

The proposed physician fee schedule was also going to cut by 50% the reimbursement for doing a procedure on the same day as an office visit. Therefore, a physician who saw a new patient and then did an EKG would only get paid 50% of the normal reimbursement for the EKG. This would have greatly impacted my practice since many (or most) of my patients get pulmonary function tests immediately before seeing me so that I can determine their response to treatment. In order to continue to be paid full reimbursement for these procedures, they would need to be done on a different day, thus requiring the patients to come in on 2 different days rather than getting their test and their physician visit on the same day. This would be a minor annoyance for patients who live in town but a significant burden on those patients who live 2-3 hours away. Fortunately, CMS decided to not institute this proposal in 2019.

So, in the end, not will change when it comes to physician reimbursement. However, there will be 2 important new reimbursable CPT codes that will allow physicians to now be paid for some of the services that they have been providing patients for free up to now. These are two new codes that pay physicians for telemedicine services. Physicians provide a lot of care over the phone and through patient portals of the electronic medical record systems. Sometimes, patients call or use the patient portal because it is more convenient than coming into the office. Sometimes it is because the physician’s regular office schedule is booked up and the patients can’t get in to see the physician. Sometimes, it is because a medical problem arises at night or on the weekend when the office is closed. And sometimes it is because the patient doesn’t want to pay a co-pay to be seen in person with an office visit. Here are the 2 new codes:

1. G2012 – Brief communication technology-based service (virtual check-in). This will be used when a patient contacts the physician by phone or via an electronic medical record patient portal to decide if an office visit is needed. If the patient does end up coming into the office to be seen, you can’t bill the code but if the physician manages the patient’s condition by phone or via the patient portal without the patient coming into the office, you can bill the code. The patient cannot have seen the patient for a regular billable encounter for 7 days prior to the phone/portal encounter or for 24 hours after the phone/portal encounter. The medical discussion should be between 5 – 10 minutes. The patient will have to give verbal consent acknowledging that the telephone/portal visit will be billed. The patient must have been seen by the physician or a physician in the physician’s group within the past 3 years. This CPT code will be compensated at 0.25 work RVUs ($9.00).
2. G2010 – Remote evaluation of recorded video and/or images submitted by an established patient. This will allow a patient to send the physician a photo or video for that physician to decide if an office visit is necessary. As an example, if a patient sends their physician a photo of a rash and the physician makes a diagnosis and directs treatment for the rash without the patient actually coming in to be seen. Similar to the “virtual check-in” code, patients cannot have been seen within the 7 previous days or within 24 hours after the video/image review. The patient must be an established patient of the physician. The patient must provide verbal or written consent acknowledging that the service will be billed. This CPT code will be compensated at 0.18 work RVUs ($6.50)

Lastly, CMS is going to give physicians a raise from $35.99 per RVU to $36.04 per RVU. That is a 1/10th of 1 percent raise in case you wondered.

November 9, 2018

In my last post, I lamented that Medicare billing will earn me $614 per hour reading pulmonary function tests but only $107 per hour in outpatient clinical practice. We all have the impression that outpatient medicine does not pay very well. But there are some ways to improve your outpatient billing by making sure that you bill all of the CPT codes that you can legitimately bill for. Here are 8 CPT codes along with the Medicare reimbursable amounts that you can bill in addition to your regular evaluation and management CPT codes that will enhance your outpatient revenue:

1. 99497 – Advanced Care Planning 30 Minutes (2.39 RVUs; $86). You can bill this code when you are having face-to-face discussions about hospice and DNR status with the patient, family members, or surrogate. Time must be documented to be between 16-45 minutes. There is no limit to the number of times this can be billed in a given year. If you spend more than 45 minutes, then you can also bill CPT code 99498 for each additional 30 minutes of face-to-face discussion. I see a lot of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an ultimately fatal disease, and end-of-life discussions are common and always take >16 minutes so this is a useful code.
2. 99358 – Prolonged Service Without Patient Contact (3.16 RVUs; $114). You can bill this code for reviewing patient records before or after an office visit with a patient. For example, if you are seeing a new patient with extensive medical records and documentation. Time must be documented and you have to have at least 31 minutes spend reviewing material to bill this code. Bill this code on the day that you review all of the records. Not only does it pay reasonably well, it can make you more efficient – by pre-reviewing all of the old records before the start of your office hours, you can spend more time actually seeing patients so that your office staff are not sitting around waiting for you to review records before putting the next patient in a room. Code 99358 is for 31-74 minutes of record review. If you spend 75-104 minutes, you can additionally bill 9359 (1.52 RVUs). Many of my patients come to me with multiple CT scans that require review of the various images, pulmonary function tests that require interpretation, lots of lab test, cardiovascular tests, hospitalization records, and outpatient notes from the referring physician. It is surprisingly easy to spend >31 minutes sorting through all of the records, doing my own interpretation of the CT images and PFTs, and documenting all of these findings in our electronic medical record.
3. 99406 – Smoking Cessation Counseling 3-10 Minutes (0.41 RVUs; $15). Few things that we do in medicine can have as great of an impact on our patient’s health than getting them to quit smoking, and Medicare will pay us to do it! You can bill this in addition to your regular evaluation and management CPT code. You need to document what you discussed and the number of minutes (I use a “smartphrase” in our Epic electronic medical record). If you spend more than 10 minutes, then you can bill CPT code 99407 (0.79 RVUs). Be sure to add a -25 modifier to indicate that the smoking cessation counseling was done in addition to your regular evaluation and management service that day. Although this CPT code does not pay very much, we almost always spend at least 3 minutes talking to the patient when we are counseling about smoking cessation so this is one of the codes I bill frequently.
4. 94664 – Inhaler Technique Training (0.49 RVUs; $18). I once read a study that found that 50% of patients use their inhalers incorrectly. This code pays us to do the right thing and ensure that all patients are using the proper technique with their inhalers. There are so many new inhaler devices on the market now that just knowing how to use one device does not necessarily mean that the patient will know how to use another device. We do not keep samples in our office except for inhalers which we keep purely for the purpose of teaching our patients when prescribing a new inhaler. Make sure you document that inhaler technique training was performed (another smartphrase). Interestingly, this CPT code is composed of a practice expense RVU and a malpractice RVU but it has no work RVU associated with it. That is because you (the physician) should not be doing the inhaler training – it should be your nurses who do this. Many pharmaceutical companies will provide demonstration inhalers that do not contain any medication – I find these less satisfactory because the patients need to know the feel and taste of the medication when it is delivered with proper technique. I bill this CPT code every time I start a patient on a new inhaler.
5. 90460 – Intramuscular Injection (0.58 RVUs; $21). This is billed in addition to the CPT code for any vaccine that you administer in the office. In other words, there is one code for the actual vaccine and one code for the injection. I often see physicians only bill the code for the vaccine and so they are leaving a lot of money on the table. If you give 2 vaccines to the same patient during one office visit, use CPT code 90461 for the second injection (0.36 RVUs). We have this CPT code bundled in with common vaccinations (influenza, 23-valent pneumovax, Prevnar-13, etc.) so that it comes up anytime I order the vaccine.
6. 99490 – Chronic Care Management 20 Minutes (1.19 RVUs; $43). Use this code when you or your staff spend at least 20 minutes per month managing patients with chronic illness when they are not in the office (paperwork, emails, phone calls, etc.). I confess: I’ve never actually billed this code because I never remember to document my time for all of the things that I do to take care of patients and the requirements are just to onerous. However, every practice has a handful of patients who occupy a disproportionately large amount of your staff’s time and your time (think about the patient who calls your office twice a week, every week). Here are the requirements:
   • Patients have to have 2 or more chronic conditions that you manage.
   • The chronic conditions are expected to last for at least 12 months or until death.
   • There is a reasonable probability of death/decompensation/exacerbation/decline if the chronic conditions are not actively managed.
   • The patient has to agree to a chronic care management plan with you (probably safest to get this signed in case of an audit but at the very least, document your conversation with the patient to this effect in the patient’s chart).
   • You (or your office staff) have to document a total of 20 minutes per month doing things like coordinating home health care, filling out various forms related to the patient and their chronic condition, phone calls with the patient, emails to the patient (preferably via your electronic medical record for HIPPA compliance), etc. That means that every time you have a phone call with that patient, you have to document the number of minutes you spent on the phone and then documenting the discussion and your staff have to document the number of minutes they spent filling out the patients FMLA forms.
   • Only one physician (or NP or PA) can bill this code for any given patient on any given month.
   • You can bill this code once each month
   • You have to adhere to the CMS scope of service for this particular CPT code including:
     • Care management including medication management and management of the patient’s medical, psychosocial, and functional needs
     • Access to care management services 24-hours a day
     • Continuity of care
     • Creation of a patient-centered care plan that is documented in writing or in the electronic medical record
     • Management of care transitions (e.g. admission to a SNF)
     • Coordination with home-based services such as home healthcare and hospice
     • Multiple ways for the patient or their care giver to contact the physician and/or the office staff (e.g. phone, electronic medical record, email)
     • Use of a certified electronic medical record that is available 24-hours a day to any physicians (or NPs or PAs) that provide cross-coverage
7. 99495 – Transition Care Management Moderate Complexity (4.64 RVUs; $167) and 99496 – Transition Care Management High Complexity (6.55 RVUs; $236). The nurse practitioner who I work with oversees our pulmonary transition clinic that has been incredibly successful at reducing our hospital’s 30-day readmission rate for COPD. CPT codes 99495 & 99496 are perfect codes to cover this service. To meet the requirements of this code, there has to be contact with the patient within 2 days of discharge from the hospital (this can be by phone from your office nursing staff) and there has to be a face-to-face visit with the physician (or NP or PA) within 14 days of discharge from the hospital (7 days for 99496). The reason that these CPT codes are associated with a high RVU value is that the first office visit after discharge from the hospital is bundled into it. That first face-to-face visit is not billed separately and is included in the CPT code but any additional office visits in the 30 days after discharge can be billed separately. The transitional care can involve things like reviewing the discharge summary, following up on any pending test results, arranging follow-up testing, medication reconciliation, etc.
8. 99354 – Prolonged Services (3.69 RVUs; $133). Use this CPT code when you spend an excessively long amount of time with an office visit. I find this code particularly useful when I am seeing a patient for the first that one of my partners has previously seen within the past 3 years (thus prohibiting me from billing that patient as a new patient visit and forcing me to use the return patient visit codes instead). The time associated with this code is 1-hour but that translates to 31-74 minutes in CMS language. Importantly, that is on top of the time it would take for a regular evaluation and management code. So, for example, if you are billing for a level 5 return visit (defined as 40 minutes by Medicare), then you have to spend at least 70 minutes with that encounter and then you would bill both the level 5 return visit CPT code plus the prolonged services CPT code.

Outpatient practice can be challenging because there is a lot of time outside of the patient’s actual office visit that is required to care for the patient. Using these codes will not make you rich but they can at least partially pay for all of the non-compensated time that you have been providing in order to manage your outpatients.

October 13, 2018

To some physicians, the words “relative value unit” or RVU were created by Satan to inflict pain and torment on physicians. But the reality is that an RVU is just another medium of exchange. A few years ago, we had a fellow in our department who was from Peru. He said that if a family did not have the money to pay their medical bills, they would give their doctor a chicken or do some yard work at the doctor’s home. Compared to bartering a chicken or a couple of hours of yard work, using money allows us to have put a relative value on individual services. The RVU is simply the way that physicians and Medicare agree on the price of the different services that physicians provide. RVUs are not inherently evil, they are just another way of stating what the fee is for any given service.

But no pricing system is perfect and some physicians will always be performing services that are over-valued or under-valued using the RVU system. If a doctor is getting a lot of RVUs for an hour of work doing a particular service or procedure, then that doctor tends to be quiet about it and not draw attention to him/herself so as to avoid someone from revaluing that service with a lower RVU. On the other hand, if a doctor is getting paid relatively few RVUs for an hour of work, that doctor is going to be very vocal about how their services are undervalued. The reality is that it is human nature for us to think that whatever service we are providing should be valued more and that we should get paid more for doing it.

Most physician practices will use the RVU as a measure of physician work effort as opposed to using the amount of cash collected. This has the advantage of overcoming the disparities between reimbursement by different insurance companies and eliminating the disincentive for individual physicians within a practice to care for uninsured patients and Medicaid patients. Therefore, physician practices will often set an annual RVU target for individual physicians to achieve in order to get paid a base salary and then provide a bonus to the physicians based on the number of RVUs they produce over that annual target.

In theory, the RVU system will generally reflect the amount of time a physician has to spend to do a given service plus the training and subspecialty expertise that goes into that particular service or procedure. However, the reality is that some procedures and services generate a lot more RVUs per hour than other procedures and services. Physicians tend to be pretty smart and they will quickly figure out which services they perform generate the most RVUs.

In my own world of pulmonary and critical care medicine, I know that the fastest way to generate a lot of RVUs is by interpreting pulmonary function tests. If I sat in front of a computer for an hour reading PFTs, I’d generate nearly 6-times more RVUs that I would by seeing patients in the office for an hour. I did an analysis of how much money I can generate per hour doing the various things I do as a pulmonary critical care physician, including my outpatient practice, working purely in the ICU, doing a combination of ICU and inpatient pulmonary consult work, seeing patients in an LTACH (long-term acute care hospital), and reading PFTs. I used the 2018 Ohio Medicare physician fee schedule and just used the work RVUs (wRVUs). I timed myself reading PFTs one day to determine how many PFTs I can read in a typical hour. I determined that I spend about 2 hours doing charting, making patient phone calls, managing test results, etc. for every 4 hours I see patients in the outpatient clinic. I timed myself doing LTACH rounds and doing a typical day of regular inpatient pulmonary/critical care practice. Overall, I can generate $614/hour reading PFTs but only $107/hour doing outpatient pulmonary practice.

For cardiologists, it is reading cardiac echos and stress tests. For neurologists, it is reading EEGs and EMGs. For sleep specialists, it is reading sleep studies. For each specialty, there are certain things the doctor does that can bring in a lot of RVUs for rather little time and effort.

But if all I did every day was read PFTs, I think my brain would melt. I might more easily hit my annual RVU targets and I might get a bigger bonus at the end of the year, but I wouldn’t necessarily be happy. The enjoyment I get from being a doctor is in the human connections made from doctor-patient relationships. The satisfaction I get is from knowing that at the end of the day, I made patients’ health a little better. I never go home at the end of the day telling my wife that I generated a record number of RVUs that day, instead, we talk about the patient whose cancer got cured or the patient who survived after getting an emergent coronary stent after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest from an acute MI.

It is often said that money can’t buy you happiness. But money can buy you the time to do the things that can bring you happiness. Similarly, the RVU won’t buy you happiness but it does buy you the extra time to do the undercompensated things that doctors do that can bring happiness and professional satisfaction.

So, yes, every year I do spend hours in a room by myself in front of a computer reading pulmonary function tests. And I do it so that I can also have the luxury of the time to talk to my patients about their last vacation and the luxury of spending a little more time with a patient explaining the implications of a newly diagnosed disease. More than anything else, those PFT RVUs buy me the time to listen to my patients.

October 8, 2018