
MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Physicians appeal to Congress for five-year transition to Medicare pay changes. Several physician groups are in Washington today to add testimony to the ongoing debate about how to reimburse doctors through Medicare, the country’s largest payer for health care expenses.
The doctors are calling for a period of payment stabilization and experimentation, and the disbandment of Congress’ sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, which sets off an annual debate over postponing dramatic cuts to the fees that health care providers can collect through Medicare. Doctors are looking at a 29.5 percent drop in Medicare pay rates next January.
Five physicians’ professional associations submitted plans to Congress mapping a transition for the current payment system. The plans all heed the political necessity for significant changes Medicare because of federal budgetary limitations, and each one calls for the SGR to eventually be replaced.
"The only way to start on a path to permanently reform the physician payment system is to repeal the SGR," American Medical Association President Cecil Wilson said in written testimony, The Hill reported.
Despite minor differences in the five plans submitted to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the proposals from the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Surgeons (ACS) — all of which plan to testify today — the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) laid out similar paths toward eliminating fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement or drastically reducing its role, writes MedScape.
Mammograms come after long waits at NYC hospitals: Report. At some New York City hospitals women have to wait weeks to get a breast exam. The city’s comptroller office surveyed nine out of 16 Health and Hospitals Corp. facilities that offer mammograms and found three had long waits to schedule the common procedure used to screen for and diagnose breast cancer, according to WNYC.
mHealth firms pitch the FDA on how to regulate mobile apps. "I think we need to get the FDA out of the business of assuring absolute safety and into one of absolutely assuring transparency around risks and making sure decisions are well-informed," West Wireless Health Institute’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joseph Smith said according to MobiHealthNews. FDA officials revealed that a draft guidance document on how the agency might regulate health apps would likely be released in coming months, the publication reported.
The green effect of health IT? Switching to electronic medical records (EMR) in its own system could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 1.7 million tons a year, according to a Kaiser Permanente study. That’s the pollution equivalent of taking more than 300,000 cars off America’s roads — but only a quarter of physicians use an EMR system, The New York Times reports.
Study identifies sex as stroke risk. According to a study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, several everyday activities could temporarily raise a person’s risk of rupturing a brain aneurysm and suffering a stroke. The study’s authors identified eight such "triggers" that "induce a sudden and short increase in blood pressure," according to Dr. Monique Vlak, lead author and a neurologist at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The risk factors, several of which could overlap, are:
- Coffee consumption (With a population attributable risk of 10.6 percent)
- Vigorous physical exercise (7.9 percent)
- Nose blowing (5.4 percent)
- Sexual intercourse (4.3 percent)
- Straining to defecate (3.6 percent)
- Cola consumption (3.5 percent)
- Being startled (2.7 percent)
- Being angry (1.3 percent)