Inside Medicare's New Payment System

What’s being done to address the range of issues like the PPE shortage, lack of testing, and financial shortfalls encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic? Here to share his team’s advocacy efforts to help tackle these and other challenges is Todd Askew, the American Medical Association's Senior Vice President of Advocacy.

Individualized healthcare is extremely important for patients with pain, but physicians and patients face barriers for such care. Drs. David Ring, Ameet Nagpal, and Steven Stanos sat down with us to provide insight on how the 2019 AMA Opioid Task Force is working to support individualized care for patients with pain.

As the nation’s opioid epidemic has now become a deadlier drug overdose epidemic, the AMA Opioid Task Force urges individualized and evidence-based patient care for those with a substance use disorder. Offering their unique perspectives on how to help patients, physician members of the AMA Opioid Task Force shared their perspectives on helping patients with a substance use disorder. Drs. Patrice Harris, Frank Dowling, Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, Sharon Levy, and John Renner.

On Nov. 1, CMS announced that Medicare will implement these changes on January 1, 2021. Physicians will no longer be required to engage in unnecessary and burdensome documentation to report office visits. The new framework will provide physicians with reporting by either total time spent on the date of the visit or the medical decision-making used in the provision of the service. Doctors Peter Hollmann and Barbara Levy will also explain the AMA/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee’s recommendations to increase the valuation of office visits.

To learn more about the potential pros and cons of a single-payer healthcare system for both physicians and patients—and even the likelihood of our country adopting such a system—Dr. Amy Mackey is joined by a representative from the American Medical Association (AMA): Vice President of Government Affairs Cynthia Brown.

Recorded live at the American Medical Association’s meeting on the new value-based approach to primary care, Alex Azar and Seema Verma take turns explaining the CMS Primary Cares initiative, which aims to put the focus back on keeping patients healthy as opposed to ordering procedures.

As the 24th Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar is pursuing four objectives, including lowering prescription drug prices and making individual insurance more affordable, while Seema Verma as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is working towards improving E/M codes to save providers’ time and money.

Recorded live at the American Medical Association’s meeting on the new value-based approach to primary care, Adam Boehler, the Director of the CMS Innovation Center, Dr. Russell Kohl with the American Academy of Family Physicians, and Dr. Kavita Patel, a member of the PTAC, break down the two sets of payment models that comprise the CMS Primary Cares initiative: Primary Care First and Direct Contracting.

How do you define value-based care? That’s the question being asked of some of the most influential stakeholders in healthcare, and to find out their answer, Dr. Matt Birnholz sits down with a few of them, including the AMA’s Vice President of Healthcare Quality Dr. Kathleen Blake, General Motors' U.S. Health Leader Sheila Savageau, North Carolina Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mandy Cohen, and Michael Seres, the CEO of 11Health.

In response to physicians’ feedback, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed some big changes to the documentation guidelines for office visits. But is there still room for improvement?

Co-chairs of the American Medical Association’s CPT/RUC Workgroup on Evaluation and Management Services Dr. Peter Hollmann and Dr. Barbara Levy join Dr. Matt Birnholz to discuss the Workgroup’s effort to further simplify the work of the healthcare provider and improve the health of patients nationwide.

There were a lot of changes made to the 2019 Medicare payment policies. Here to review what these updates mean—and what’s being done in response to them—is Dr. Barbara McAneny, President of the AMA.