You may have thought DecisionHealth was finished mining information from CPT 2014. Think again! Here’s a peek into the quality measures section of the manual.
 
For the past few weeks we’ve been working off the electronic version of the book and focused on new and revised Category I and III codes. (And you can be sure newletters like the Cardiology Coder's Pink Sheet will continue to provide coverage of the changes in CPT 2014.)
 
But after Laura Evans, editor of the Orthopedic Coder's Pink Sheet and Medical Practice Coding Pro shared her hot-off-the-presses copy of the book, we took a look at the Category II codes – A.K.A. the physician quality measures system codes – and noticed the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) has been added to the list of measures developers.
 
After a careful count we came up with 14 ASA measures flagged by the little red dot that means “Look at me, I’m a new code!” We did some preliminary searching and it appears they’ll be divided up and used to report four measures: Post-anesthetic transfer of care, prevention of post-op nausea and vomiting, maintenance of norothermia (this in addition to the existing body temp. measure) and pre-op aspirin for patients with stents.
 
We know from CMS data on successful reporting that despite the small number of “official” anesthesia measures, anesthesia providers have done very well at the PQRS game. We’ll be interested to see what they do with the expanded opportunities offered by more measures. And before that, we’ll be watching the Anesthesia & Pain Coder’s Pink Sheet to learn how they’ll report these measures. (We also predict a webinar on this topic in the not too distant future. Stay tuned.)