Will Your ASC Be More Versatile Soon?

Physicians have mostly performed eye procedures and colonoscopies in ASCs, CMS says. But now that CMS has massively boosted the number of procedures your doctor can perform in an ASC (see "Approved Procedure List Grows -- but Not All ASCs Will Win" on page 43), Medicare expects to see doctors performing different types of procedures.
"Some of the new ASC procedures currently performed in the hospital outpatient department and the physician’s office will move to the ASC setting," CMS predicts. But some current ASC procedures may also move to other locations because of the payments, which are based on the outpatient prospective payment system and will be lower for some items.
CMS isn’t recognizing that private insurers have already been paying for many of these procedures in the ASC setting, says Craig Jeffries, executive director of the American Association of Ambulatory Surgery Centers. Medicare’s recent payment reforms are "simply catching up with what private insurers have been doing for years."
Bottom line: The new Medicare standards are just requiring "the state of the art" in most ASCs already, says Jeffries. But they may help to provide confidence that your ASC is able to host more complex procedures.

- Published on 2007-10-25