Compliance Corner

Medicare issued an emergency update to correct technical errors in certain elements of the 2015 Medicare physician fee schedule. For the most part, these corrections have little effect on laboratory fees paid on the Medicare physician fee schedule but it is important to be aware of the errors in order to assess their impact on your laboratory. First, the conversion factor was lowered from 35.8013 to 35.7547, a change of -0.0466. Unless a test uses many multiples of the conversion factor, the impact may be not significant. However, according to an article published on Feb. 2, on the Supercoder.com website, there is one laboratory procedure that benefited because of a technical change to a relative value unit (RVU). According to the article, a revision to the RVUs for CPT 88348 (Electron microscopy, diagnostic) raised the value from 5.88 to 9.70. That means you can now expect $346.82 for the global electron microscopy service instead of $210.51 under the originally-published fee schedule.