2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

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However, as noted previously in our proposal to remove
data for specialties that make up less than 5 percent of the
total volume for that service, we also recognize the need to
take steps to minimize the risk that aberrant data would
inappropriately skew the malpractice RVU calculation. We
believe that, for most services, the proposal to remove
specialties making up less than 5 percent of the occurrences
will ensure that aberrant data are removed. Yet for those
services with especially low volumes, the malpractice RVUs
may be especially susceptible to the influence of aberrant
data in only a very few cases (but more than 5 percent, that
is, 2 cases in a service with 20 occurrences). We will
continue to evaluate ways to ensure these low-volume
services are not skewed by a few occurrences of aberrant
data, but we are concerned that including only the dominant
specialty performing these services would exclude data from
other specialties that are actually performing them.
We are not proposing to adopt this methodology at this
time. We would note that low volume procedures or services
are not necessarily performed by only one specialty. As
noted above, we would distinguish between excluding data
presumed to be erroneous from data reflecting utilization by
specialties that perform a service but are not the dominant
specialty. However, we acknowledge that there may be
instances where aberrant data exist that would not be