AMA supports HCFA changes

Besides calling for congressional hearings into how the Health Care Financing Administration manages its anti-fraud programs, delegates to the American Medical Association’s Dec. 2 interim meeting also approved reports:

• demanding major changes in Medicare prepayment and post-payment review programs that would require physicians to receive due process and accurate and clinically informed review of their services;

• calling for well-designed pilot tests to assess any new E/M guidelines before implementation by HCFA;

• reaffirming the AMA’s efforts to advance other alternatives to numerical guidelines as a basis for coding review, including peer review of statistical outliers.