CMS has issued corrections for its calendar year 2014 proposed rule for Medicare's outpatient prospective payment and ambulatory surgical center payment systems and has extended the comment period 10 days to Sept. 16 for that rule.
The corrections address various technical errors contained in the original proposed rule, which CMS issued in July. After issuing the rule, the agency reviewed the data it used to develop the payment rates and discovered some cost estimation errors occurred. Although the errors are isolated to a few ambulatory payment classifications, they affect other outpatient payment rates because of the budget neutral payment system, according to the correction notice.
For example, the original payment system rule proposed reconfiguring coding and payments for visit ambulatory payment classifications in 2014. While reviewing the cost modeling for the proposed policy, CMS discovered packaged costs for a separate diagnostic lab test proposal were left out due to a programming error.
Subsequently, CMS fixed the programming issue and developed relative payment rates for new proposed visit ambulatory payment classifications including hospital clinic visits, type A emergency visits and type B emergency visits.
View the CMS correction notice for more details about the corrections made to the proposed rule.
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