Don’t give up hope -- Lobbying does work

January 12th, 2015

As healthcare providers face a 2% Medicare cut on April 1, due to the sequestration, it’s important to remember that there is still a possibility for a retroactive solution. And keep in mind, lobbying does work.

Just look to the American Society of Anesthesiologists as an example. In 2009, CMS released its interpretative guidelines for the Hospital Conditions of Participation (CoPs). ASA members went to work. They wrote letters. They met with CMs officials. The goal? Make substantive changes to the interpretive guidelines. The strategy worked. When those updated CoPs were released, many of the ASA’s suggested changes, which were substantive, were included.

Now the only thing left to do is to make sense of the changes. And who wants to go through hundreds of pages of government regulations? AHC Media, publisher of this blog, has put together a resource to guide you. Cracking the Code: Understanding the CMS Hospital CoP Standards on Anesthesia is a book with a section-by-section guide to those changes and what they mean for hospitals. The chapters are organized in the order in which the anesthesia standards are contained in the hospital CoP manual. What could be easier than that?

The book covers anesthesia services, organization and staffing, preanesthesia evaluations, the intraoperative anesthesia record and required policies and procedures, and post-anesthesia assessments. We even have a list of FAQs. Your questions are probably on that list! The book also includes hundreds of pages of policies and forms that you can duplicate rather than having to start from scratch. The author is the renowned Sue Dill, RN, Esq., CPHRM, BSN, MSN, JD, president of the Patient Safety and Health Care Consulting in Dublin, OH, and former chief learning officer of the Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation.

The book is generating a lot of excitement. We sent out a press release this week, and hundreds of media outlets already have picked it up, not to mention numerous tweets.

There’s no time to lose. Most of the changes were effective immediately. Avoid problems with your Medicare reimbursement by getting in compliance now. With the 2% cuts coming, you need every claim processed as quickly as possible! (For more on the sequestration, see our blog “Healthcare braces for sequestration impact.”)