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:
- 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).
- 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
