CHICAGO — The American Medical Association and about 170 medical groups sent the following letter to Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, regarding the administration’s proposals included in the 2019 Medicare physician payment rule.

The full text of the letter is below:

Dear Administrator Verma:

The undersigned organizations representing physicians and other health professionals welcome and strongly support the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “Patients Over Paperwork” initiative. We appreciate your outreach to our community and are solidly behind your goal of reducing administrative burdens for physicians and other health care professionals so that they can devote more time to patient care. The proposals included in the 2019 Medicare physician payment rule demonstrate that you listened to our members’ concerns about the significant administrative burdens due to the documentation requirements associated with Evaluation and Management (E/M) services. We are grateful for your efforts to simplify these requirements and reduce their associated red tape.

Excessive E/M documentation requirements do not just take time away from patient care; they also make it more difficult to locate medical information in patients’ records that is necessary to provide high quality care. Physicians and other health care professionals are extremely frustrated by “note bloat,” with pages and pages of redundant information that makes it difficult to quickly find important information about the patient’s present illness or most recent test results. Several of the documentation policy changes included in the proposed rule would go a long way toward alleviating this problem and the undersigned organizations urge immediate adoption:

Changing the required documentation of the patient’s history to focus only on the interval history since the previous visit;
Eliminating the requirement for physicians to re-document information that has already been documented in the patient’s record by practice staff or by the patient; and
Removing the need to justify providing a home visit instead of an office visit.
Implementation of these policies will streamline documentation requirements, reduce note bloat, improve workflow, and contribute to a better environment for health care professionals and their Medicare patients.

Regarding the proposal to collapse payment rates for eight office visit services for new and established patients down to two each, the undersigned organizations believe there are a number of unanswered questions and potential unintended consequences that would result from the coding policies in the proposed rule. We oppose the implementation of this proposal because it could hurt physicians and other health care professionals in specialties that treat the sickest patients, as well as those who provide comprehensive primary care, ultimately jeopardizing patients’ access to care. We also urge that the new multiple service payment reduction policy in the proposed rule not be adopted as the issue of multiple services on the same day of service was factored into prior valuations of the affected codes. The proposal also has significant impact on certain services, such as chemotherapy administration, that may be an unintended consequence of altering the current practice expense methodology to accommodate the proposal.

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