Government Relations Committee Minutes for September 15, 2009
Present: Barry Reiter, Bill Finerfrock, Jud Neal, Dennis Mock, Kathy Canny, Don Rodden, Sherri Dumford, Dave Nicholson, Tim Karhu, Ken Goodin
Absent: Bob Burleigh, Randy Roat, Lonnie Johnson, Shawn Keough-Hartz, Susan Gregg, Holly Louie
Dennis moved to approve the August 11, 2009 minutes and Cathy seconded.
1. Advocacy Resource Vision - Brad
Brad discussed with the Executive Committee the Advocacy Resource and the interest level is very strong. This will enable members to communicate with Congress and several other features. Capwiz is a product that does the job for us unfortunately this product has a license fee of $6,000 and an annual fee of $5,000. A little rich for what we are trying to achieve at this time. We have passed all this information on to our programmers who are working to replicate the pieces we liked from Capwiz and hard wire it right into our own system. This will be similar to MGMA’s program and the MGMA pages have been provided to the programmers. Once we have the tool available, Bill will help create the messages so that our members can create and send those messages.
2. 2010 Physicians Fee Schedule review of issues relevant to HBMA by the GR Committee
There have been no comments from the GR Committee and there is nothing that really stood out relevant to HBMA in the fee schedule.
ACTION: Ken will forward to the GR Committee the AMA comments regarding the Physicians Fee Schedule.
3. ICD-10 Update - Code Set Freeze
Bill read the main topics on the conference call. The GR Committee will review the document at our meeting Tuesday in Las Vegas when Holly is present and we will have a more productive discussion. Holly is on her way to Baltimore to attend the ICD-10 meeting. During the public comments time she will take time to highlight some of the comments and we also sent comments ahead of time to Pat Brooks at her request.
4. Healthcare Reform Update – Bill
Baucus will release his proposal tomorrow. Bill will talk about this during his presentation at the Spring Conference after he has analyzed this proposal and the reactions. Bill does not see the SGR fix in the near future. The House approach leans toward a long-term permanent fix while Baucus looks at a one-year fix. It is very expensive to fix the SGR problem and how are they going to pay for the fix and it could be worse for certain specialties or geographic regions. Don suggested that the SGR fix would be a good topic for dissemination in the next few months and Bill agreed.
5. MAC Implementation Status -Conversations with Karen Jackson – Sherri
Sheri suggested we should keep this on the agenda and asked Brad to let us know if he hears of any issues on the list-serve. When the GR Committee had their Washington visits they were asked to provide a comment to the proposed Transparency bill. Bill, Cathy, Sherri, Bob and Susan Gregg have reviewed this and want to wait and see what happens with the Healthcare Reform. Barry shared with the committee that he has received a notification from CMS that NY will need written documentation for all office consultations level 5? Sherri said from a hospital prospective, she is getting requests for all critical care.
Meeting Adjourned.