2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

specialties listed infrequently as performing a certain
procedure. The assumption was that the infrequent instances
of these specialties in our data represent aberrant
occurrences and removing the associated risk factor from the
malpractice RVU calculation would improve accuracy and
stability of the RVUs.
We excluded evaluation and management (E&M) services
from the analysis. Medicare claims data show that E&M codes
are performed by virtually all physician specialties.
Therefore, in the case of E&M codes, it is likely that even
the low relative percentages of performance by some
specialties would accurately represent the provision of the
service by those specialties.
For all services other than E&M services, we believe
removing data attributable to specialties that occur in our
data less than 5 percent of the time would most
appropriately balance the objective to identify aberrant
data (claims with a specialty identified that is highly
unlikely to have performed a particular procedure) while
including specialties that perform a procedure a small
percentage of the time. We believe a higher threshold would
result in the removal of data for specialties actually
performing the procedure, while a lower threshold would
likely fail to remove some aberrant data, particularly for
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