Protect Patient Access to Care
Preserve Office-based Imaging Services

Cuts to Imaging Services will Impede Patient Access

Effective January 1, 2007, under the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, payment for the technical component (e.g. equipment, non-physician personal, supplies, and overhead) of an imaging service in a physician’s office will be set at the Hospital Outpatient Department (HOPD) payment rate if the hospital rate is lower. This change:

• Fails to recognize fundamental differences between the costs associated with practicing medicine in a physician’s office and practicing medicine in a HOPD;
• May inappropriately limit access to local imaging services and impede timely diagnosis and treatment if Medicare beneficiaries must travel elsewhere for care.

Imaging Services are Integral to Office-based Orthopaedic Practice

• Imaging is no longer performed in isolated imaging laboratories, but rather is integrated into office-based practice as a tool in diagnosing, monitoring and treating patients.
• The orthopaedic surgeon is able to add functional, anatomical and clinical assessments – resulting in patient-specific information – to the interpretation of an image. Unlike radiologists, orthopaedic surgeons have the advantage of examining patients and being intimately familiar with the specifics of a patient’s case, outside of just what is seen in a diagnostic image.
• The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (Med PAC), in its 2005 report to Congress, could not determine if growth in diagnostic imaging was inappropriate.
• Facilitating appropriate care may well result in legitimate growth of these services by non-radiologists where the growth rates of concern—MRI, CT, and PET--- continue to be performed primarily by radiologists.

AAOS supports:

• Preventing the cuts in office-based imaging services from taking effect on January 1, 2007.
• Consideration by Congress and the Federal agencies of quality-related initiatives, training and certification standards for imaging services across a broad range of specialty societies.

Please support congressional action to ensure patient access to office-based imaging services by non-radiologists.

For additional information, please contact Kathryn Pontzer, AAOS Washington Office, at (202) 546-4430