Room Block Extended - Discounts Offered

The ASIPP discounted room block for the 2007 Competency Review Courses and Examinations in Coding, Compliance, and Practice Management & Controlled Substance Management has been extended to Monday, March 19. Management.ends on Monday, March 13. To assure your discounted rate, you should register and book your room before 5 PM on Monday.

Currently the hotel has no rooms available beyond the ASIPP room block. To secure your room and discounted rate, you should register and book your room before 5 PM on Monday.

Discounts Offered

In response to your requests, ASIPP is offering a discounted fee for the review course for non-physicians. Registration for non-physicians has been reduced $200. The registration fee for both courses is now $1,000. Individual courses have also been reduced to $700.

Exam Registration for Physicians has also been reduced. Now you may register for both exams for $1,000 - single exams are now $500. Refunds will be issued to those who have already registered where applicable.

The course will be held at the Caribe Royale Resort in beautiful Orlando, FL. The five-day intensive review course (April 12- 16) is planned as a CME activity to prepare physicians seeking competency certification and to provide interventional pain management Specialists and other healthcare providers an in-depth review of multiple areas of interventional pain management. The exam will follow on April 17.

In today's environment of regulations and litigation, this is one course you can't afford to miss. courses and exams.

Discounted Registration Form

Representatives Frank Pallone and Ed Whitfield are working hard to get their collegues to sign on to a letter to CMS in an effort to encourage CMS to re-evaluate the proposed ASC rule and the payment formula it holds. We must help them convince their colleagues through our calls and letters to our public officials.

These ASC cuts will be devastating not only for those who are currently practicing in the ASC setting but eventually they will affect all who practice pain management including office-based practices. It is an issue of access and the trend. Once the procedures are reimbursed at a lower rate in ASCs the cuts will create even deeper cuts to the office setting. Eventually everyone will fill these cuts.

Here's the bottom line:

• In the proposed rule, 9 of the top 11 procedures performed by interventional pain physicians in an ASC will face a permanent reduction of 27% starting in 2009 (total of 135% over a 5-year period).
• Even during the phase-in period of 2008, cuts will be approximately 12%. (see fact sheet)

This is our battle and Rep. Pallone and Whitfield can not make this happen alone.  We must continue to write letters to Congress with our requests to co-sign this letter and save interventional pain management. One letter is not enough, it will take many letters to make a true impact.

In order to do this, we need each and every member to participate. You must not only send letters for yourself, but also ask your colleagues, staff, friends, and patients to do the same. Please continue to send these letters and to ask your friends, family and patients to as well. We must keep this effort going until the March 23, 2007 deadline for signatures.

Capwiz links:
Physicians: http://capwiz.com/asipp/issues/alert/?alertid=9377426&type=CO
Patients: http://capwiz.com/asipp/issues/alert/?alertid=9377586&type=CO
Staff, friends and family: http://capwiz.com/asipp/issues/alert/?alertid=9377651&type=CO

CMS Letter

The Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services (CMS) released a one-time notification on March 9 introducing the 2007 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).

On December 20, 2006, President Bush signed the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (TRHCA). TRHCA Section 101 authorizes a financial incentive for eligible professionals to participate in a voluntary quality reporting program. Eligible professionals, who chose to participate and successfully report on a designated set of quality measures for services paid under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and provided between July 1 and December 31, 2007, may earn a bonus payment of 1.5% of their charges during that period, subject to a cap. CMS has titled the statutory program the 2007 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).

Read the notification.

MLN Matters

Emergency room visits involving the abuse or misuse of pharmaceuticals -- including narcotics such as methadone and OxyContin and the stimulant Ritalin -- jumped by 21% from 2004 to 2005, according to a report being released today by the Substance and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) from data collected by the Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The number of overdoses involving legal pharmaceuticals is approaching the number involving cocaine and heroin, which has been relatively stable. Emergency rooms tallied 613,053 treatments involving cocaine and heroin overdoses in 2005, compared with 598,542 visits involving misuse of pharmaceuticals.

Read More...

USA Today

UnitedHealth Group, the nation's second-largest private payor announced that beginning March 1, it would institute a controversial policy that will minimally fine a physician $50 if a patient goes outside Untied's network for lab services.

However, UnitedHealth announced on March 9 that this policy would be suspended in New Jersey. N.J. Department of Banking and Insurance said in a statement that it asked the insurer not to implement the plan because it was "not satisfied with the legality of these protocols." The department is having discussions with UnitedHealth about the policy, which would allow the insurer to fine a doctor $50 if a patient has tests done in facilities besides Laboratory Corp. of America or other labs the company selected. It is unclear when the discussions would conclude.

UnitedHealth

Boston.com

In late Feb. 2007, Florida withdrew an appeal of a federal district court decision which granted Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment and entered a permanent injunction directing the state of Florida to stop enforcing its 2004 Neurontin coverage policy.

The Plaintiffs brought this class action after Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) repeatedly refused to reimburse the Plaintiffs for Neurontin, or its generic equivalent Gabapetin, which the Plaintiffs' physician had appropriately prescribed off label. This case highlights the fact that, while states have broad discretion in implementing their Medicaid programs, the

Sidley Austin LLP Health Care Industry Update

More than 14,700 people have accessed the article “A randomized, controlled trial of spinal endoscopic adhesiolysis in chronic refractory low back and lower extremity pain,” earning it a “highly accessed” flag on BioMed Central’s online journal, Anesthesiology. The article, authored by Laxmaiah Manchikanti, Mark V. Boswell, Jose J. Rivera, Vidyasagar Pampati, Kim S. Damron, Carla D. McManus, Doris E. Brandon and Sue R. Wilson, has been on the web site since Aug. 1, 2006. The “highly accessed” graphic appears on the journal’s table of contents and search results to identify those articles that have been especially highly accessed, relative to their age, and the journal in which they were published.

“Prevalence of facet joint pain in chronic spinal pain of cervical, thoracic and lumbar regions," a May 2004 article by Laxmaiah Manchikanti, Mark V. Boswell, Vijay Singh, Vidyasagar Pampati, Kim S. Damron and Carla D. Beyer. This article has been accessed by more than 31,000 people since it first appeared on BioMed Central.

“Risk of whole body radiation exposure and protective measures in fluoroscopically guided interventional techniques: a prospective evaluation.” The article, written by Laxmaiah Manchikanti, Kim A. Cash, Tammy L. Moss, Jose Rivera, and Vidyasagar Pampati, was published in 2003, has been viewed over 12,600 times, and as the articles mentioned above, is available to open access on the BioMed Central Web site.

Acess these articles on BioMed Central

BioMed Central