AAOS Now, May 2013
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Young Orthopaedic Patients Find Their Voices on Capitol Hill
Orthopaedic surgeons, patients, and researchers from 21 states visited Capitol Hill in February to raise awareness of musculoskeletal diseases and disorders and to highlight the need for continued federal research funding. The annual AAOS Research Capitol Hill (RCH)Days advocacy event provided an opportunity for patients with a broad range of musculoskeletal conditions to share their stories with members of Congress and underscore the value of orthopaedic research.
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AAOS Meets with CMS on Quality Measures
On March 14, Thomas C. Barber, MD, chair of the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Council on Advocacy; William R. Martin III, MD, AAOS medical director; and staff from the AAOS office of government relations met with officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to discuss quality measures required under the electronic health record (EHR) adoption program and other reporting programs.
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What Do You Know About Sequestration?
Jamie A. Gregorian. Esq. Although most of the automatic spending cuts referred to as sequestration went into effect on March 1, and Medicare payment cuts went into effect on April 1, most Americans have not yet felt their impact. As the New York Times put it, “[t]he process of trimming government budgets is slow and cumbersome, involving notifications to unions about temporary furloughs, reductions in overtime pay and cuts in grant financing to state and local programs.
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Second Look Advocacy
Geographic variation in healthcare spending An interim report on geographic variation in healthcare spending released by the Institute of Medicine observes that, even after adjusting for variables such as wages, rents, and attributes of Medicare patient populations, including age and health status, a significant amount of regional variation in Medicare payments remains unexplained.
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Graduate Medical Education and the Orthopaedic Workforce
The U.S. healthcare environment is continually changing—from the activity levels of patients, rollbacks in retirement age, and an aging society burdened with chronic diseases, to the implementation of innovative, quality-focused models of healthcare delivery—and the country is facing physician shortages in both primary and specialty care. Meanwhile, federal funding for academic medical centers continues to decrease with new cuts directed at graduate medical education (GME).
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Preserving Patient Access to In-Office Services
Orthopaedic surgeons at the Peachtree Orthopaedic Clinic (POC) in Atlanta are taking the recent threats to own in-office ancillary services (IOAS), including physical therapy services, very seriously. They’ve initiated a campaign to inform patients about the impact on access to care that closing the IAOS exception would have. (See “What’s Behind the Threat to IOAS.”) POC has seven clinic locations, including four physical therapy locations, two surgery centers, and two MRI facilities.
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What’s Behind the Threat to IOAS
Although the Stark self-referral laws extended restrictions on physicians’ self-referral of radiology services to entities in which they have an ownership interest, the IOAS exception allows physicians to refer patients for ancillary services in their own practices, including physical therapy, laboratory services, orthotics and prosthetics, among others.
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Administration Pushing New Payment Models
NCPPR calls for “drastic changes” to fee-for-service Jordan C. Apfeld, BA; Daniel J. Stinner, MD; A. Alex Jahangir, MD, MMHC; and Manish K. Sethi, MD Three years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) became law, the American healthcare system continues to struggle with both high costs and irregular quality.