2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

hour for these specialties. As noted in the preamble
discussion regarding our proposal to change the PE
methodology, the nonphysician work pool was created to
protect codes without physician work components until
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further refinement could occur. Removing these codes from
the nonphysician work pool generally has a negative impact
on these codes (although we note that we have consistently
indicated this methodology was an interim approach until we
had better data available). In addition, the limited number
of codes remaining in the nonphysician work pool would also
experience significant impacts. Eliminating the
nonphysician work pool would generally negatively impact
these codes remaining in the pool (for example, certain
codes used by audiology and portable x-ray suppliers). We
believe that much of this impact is due to the change in the
scaling of the inputs when codes move from the nonphysician
work pool to the individual specialty pool.
We believe that, in addition to the increased accuracy
and simplicity that result from using a "bottom-up" approach
for direct costs, this proposed approach also helps mitigate
some of the potentially inequitable redistribution of
practice expense RVUs resulting from the acceptance of new
specialty-specific survey data. However, several of the
impacts that are shown require further consideration.