Home Health & Hospice Week

Medical director makes announcement at Medtrade.

The statistical analysis durable medical equipment regional carrier is getting serious about power mobility codes: The SADMERC medical director announced recently that he will focus on fixing the codes after two earlier attempts to finalize them failed.

Just days after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it would delay code implementation, SADMERC's Dr. Doran Edwards told Medtrade attendees he would devote his full attention to reworking the codes--and that he was convening a 12-person advisory panel to help get the job done.

"I have suspended all of my other SADMERC duties for this one project," he said during a Medtrade session presented by the National Coalition for Assistive & Rehab Technology.

CMS last month announced it would delay implementation of the codes, which had been scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2006. A month before that, the agency added 13 codes to the 49 it had issued in February and revamped testing requirements.

The panel should be up and running within a month, Edwards said. Members will have broad experience and will have worked with more than one company or with a large cross-section of the relevant population, he added.

The SADMERC would like to have the codes completed by April, but that may be difficult given the logistics involved in establishing the committee. The next date it would aim for would be July 1, and if that does not work, then Oct. 1.

Rather than simply looking at how fast and far a wheelchair goes, the new codes will take into account the functional needs of the patient--and that's good news to Peggy Walker of the Waterloo, IA-based VGM Group. "That's what we wanted," Walker tells Eli. "The typical Medicare patient doesn't sit at home anymore."