Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Physician signatures on every lab requisition were perceived as cumbersome, unnecessary. Clinical laboratories can finally exhale. On June 30, CMS published a proposal to retract its policy requiring a physician or NPP signature on every lab requisition, which had been set to go into effect earlier this year but was delayed several times due to massive opposition throughout the industry. CMS had initially announced that the lab signature requirement would go into effect on Jan. 1, but later delayed it until April 1. However, on March 31, CMS announced that it would further delay the requirement and "focus for the remainder of 2011 on changing the regulation that requires signatures on laboratory requisitions because of concerns that physicians, NPPs, and clinical diagnostic laboratories are having difficulty complying with this policy." That gave labs hope that the requirement would be killed for good sometime this year. In black and white: The [...]