The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the proposed calendar year 2021 updates for the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. The Official Medical Fee Schedule for the California worker’s compensation system correlates with Medicare fees. Hence the announced changes will have implications in the workers’ compensation industry.

The press release began by highlighting changes the Trump administration was making to expand permanently the telehealth benefits that Medicare beneficiaries have begun receiving during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then discussed changes it was making to the fee schedule — specifically to the paperwork requirements for evaluation and management (E/M) codes that doctors use to bill for office visits.

“The Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate burdensome billing and coding requirements for Evaluation and Management visits that make up 20% of the spending under the Physician Fee Schedule,” the release noted. “These billing and documentation requirements for E/M codes were established 20 years ago and have been subject to longstanding criticism from clinicians that they do not reflect current care practices and needs.”

“After extensive stakeholder collaboration with the American Medical Association and others, simplified coding and billing requirements for E/M visits will go into effect January 1, 2021, saving clinicians 2.3 million hours per year in burden reduction,” CMS said. “As a result of this change, clinicians will be able to make better use of their time and restore the doctor-patient relationship by spending less time on documenting visits and more time on treating their patients.”

The proposed rule lists (on p. 897) the estimated impacts of the rule’s payment changes for each specialty, which included losers as well as winners.

Three specialties fare the best: endocrinology, with a 17% increase; rheumatology, with a 16% increase; and hematology/oncology, with a 14% increase. At the bottom are nurse anesthetists and radiologists, both with an 11% decrease; chiropractors, with a 10% decrease; and interventional radiology, pathology, physical and occupational therapy, and cardiac surgery, all with a 9% decrease.

Surgical specialties in general took some of the biggest hits, with cuts in every category ranging from 5% to 9%.

The proposed rule also lists the fee schedule’s final conversion factor — the amount that Medicare’s relative value units (RVUs) are multiplied by to arrive at a reimbursement for a particular service or procedure under Medicare’s fee-for-service system. Due to budget neutrality changes required by law, the proposed 2021 conversion factor is $32.26, a decrease of $3.83 from the 2020 conversion factor of $36.09, CMS said.

And not everyone is happy with these changes. “Under the proposal, neurosurgeons face overall payment cuts of at least 7% at a time when the nation’s healthcare system is already stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said a joint statement from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS). “The reductions are primarily driven by new Medicare payment policies for office and outpatient visits that CMS will implement on January 1, 2021. Drastic cuts caused by changes to these visit codes … will undermine patient access to neurosurgical care.”