AAHKS News

New Part D policies from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) can be reviewed in a roadmap published in a recent blog by Principal Deputy Administrator for Operations, Kimberly Brandt, “Early last year, the published a roadmap outlining our efforts to...

The not-for-profit Health Level Seven (HL7) Da Vinci Project aims to develop content standards that help providers and others to positively impact clinical, quality, cost and care management outcomes. The Da Vinci Project is working with CMS on a survey where the...

AAHKS commented on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) proposed rule to modify requirements for use of the HIPAA National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) D.0 Standard. The proposed rule “would adopt a modification to the requirements for the use...

The CMS Innovation Center will open a new enrollment period for Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Advanced, which started on October 1, 2018 and runs through December 31, 2023. The new application period will open this month for participation in Model Year...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently mailed letters to all Medicare fee-for-service providers about work to reduce opioid misuse by people covered by Medicare. The letter touches on three initiatives including a “roadmap” to help frame the...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a Medicare Learning Network (MLN) newsletter to help clarify a final rule that removes total knee arthroplasty from the inpatient only list. AAHKS and AAOS will be meeting with CMS later this month to...

AAHKS was represented by Adam Sassoon, MD, MS, at this week’s AMA Relative Value Update Committee (RUC) Meeting. The RUC is the AMA body that describes the resources and time required to provide physician services in developing RVUs and makes recommendations to the...

The New England Journal of Medicine published a two-year evaluation of cases from hospitals covered by the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) bundled payment program. The study compared 280,161 hip and knee replacement procedures in 803 hospitals in...

As previously reported, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently identified seven high volume current procedural terminology (CPT) codes as potentially misvalued, among which were 27130 (total hip arthroplasty) and 27447 (total knee arthroplasty),...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), through Yale New Haven Health Services Corporation/Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation (CORE), has developed claims-based hospital measures to assess the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries by...

Leaders from AAHKS and AAOS engaged with representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) this week to address the designation of hip and knee arthroplasty codes as “potentially misvalued” in the 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule,...

CMS recently released the 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule and identified seven high volume current procedural terminology (CPT) codes as potentially misvalued, among which were 27130 (total hip arthroplasty) and 27447 (total knee arthroplasty). CMS...