2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

Audiology is clearly negatively impacted when its
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services are removed from the nonphysician work pool, though
the impact is cut nearly in half when the "bottom-up"
approach is used for the direct costs. This impact is in
large part driven by the decrease in the PE RVUs for
audiology CPT codes 92557, 92567 and 92588, which we believe
may now be more appropriately priced in our proposal than
they were in the nonphysician work pool that uses historic
charge-based RVUs to determine the direct practice expense
for a service. However, we would welcome discussions with
audiologists regarding this impact, so that we can ensure
that the relative costs are reflected appropriately.
Despite submitting a supplementary survey that showed
higher PE costs per hour, cardiology is shown to have an
impact of -2.1 percent in the last column of Table 30. This
is largely due to the decrease in direct PE for several
high-volume services resulting from the adoption of the
“bottom up” approach. For example, the RVUs for the
complete electrocardiogram service, CPT code 93000, decline
by 43 percent. The RVUs for multiple 3-D heart imaging, CPT
Code 78465, decline by 32 percent. However, it should be
noted that, if the new survey data had not been used to
calculate indirect PE, cardiology would have had a
significantly larger (11 percent) negative impact.