2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

low-volume codes (fewer than 100 occurrences, where each
claim represent 1 or more percentage points).
The overall impact of removing the risk factor for
specialties that occur less than 5 percent of the time in
our data for a procedure is minimal. There is no impact on
the malpractice RVUs for over 5,280 codes, and there is an
impact of less than 1 percent on the malpractice RVUs for
over 1,300 additional codes. Only 16 codes decrease by at
least 0.1 RVUs, with the biggest decrease being a negative
0.28 impact on the malpractice RVU for CPT code 17108,
Destruction of skin lesions, from a current RVU of 0.82 to a
proposed RVU of 0.54.
Conversely, there are 219 codes for which RVUs increase
by at least 0.1, the largest increase being a positive 0.81
RVU increase for CPT code 61583, Craniofacial approach,
skull, from a current RVU of 8.32 to a proposed RVU of 9.13.
Among codes whose malpractice RVUs would increase under our
proposal, 646 have increases of less than 1 percent. The
impact analysis section of this proposed rule examines the
effects of this proposed change by specialty.
2. Specialty Crosswalk Issues
Malpractice insurers generally use five-digit codes
developed by the Insurance Services Office (ISO), an
advisory body serving property and casualty insurers, to
classify physician specialties into different risk classes
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