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Anesthesia Coding Alert

Reimbursement:

Don't Miss This Increase in the Medicare ACF for All 2012 Claims

Published on Thu Apr 12, 2012

Re-analyze your claims for Q1 services that deserve higher pay.You have reason to celebrate good news for your practice's bottom line, thanks to a recent reimbursement clarification from CMS. The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) has clarified that previously announced changes to the Medicare anesthesia conversion factor (ACF) resulted from an error in the original calculations of the CY 2012 ACF. Result: CMS instructed its contractors to update their claims processing files to use the updated locale-specific conversion factors by March 15, 2012. Now that the revision is in place, the total increase in unadjusted ACF from CY 2011 to CY 2012 is 2.0 percent. Locale-specific ACFs increase from $0.08 to $0.13 per unit, which translates to an additional increase of 0.42 percent to 0.59 percent above the originally posted ACFs per locale. Consider a few examples: Alabama's ACF increased from $20.05 to $20.14 San Francisco's ACF increased from $22.81 [...]
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