On the afternoon of December 16, 2010, I listened to the very informative Washington G2 Reports webinar entitled “Challenges Ahead for Clinical Laboratories: Addressing Medicare’s New Policy on Lab Requisitions and Other Changes for 2011.” One of the presenters, Alan Mertz, President of ACLA (www.clinical-labs.org), shared that he spoke that morning with Jonathan Blum, Center for Medicare Deputy Administrator and Director at CMS, and that Mr. Blum authorized Alan to announce that CMS is going to delay the ruling!! At this point, the length of the delay is unknown. ACLA thinks shorter rather than longer. Expect an official announcement via CMS transmittal in the next few days.
You can check for the transmittal at www.cms.gov. On the bottom right of the main page you will find the “Top 10 Links.” Click on “Transmittals,” and then select “2010 Transmittals.” As soon as the CMS posts this news, you will find it here, and we can all begin shouting from the mountaintop.
I thank all of you for the many questions posted here on colLABoration and on Orchard’s user groups. On your behalf, I posed them to the webinar presenters who agreed they were challenging questions from the real world. ACLA will take your questions along with many others, to their next series of meetings with CMS in hopes of clarifying the lab industry’s concerns. Keep the questions coming by submitting them directly to Alan at ACLA amertz@clinical-labs.org or by commenting on the final rule (instructions in my December 9, 2010, blog post).
My favorite quote from the webinar was the person who commented that every administrator in CMS should be required to spend an evening in a busy lab accessioning area. There’s a reality check for you!
Ginger Wooster, MBA, MT (ASCP)
Director of Regulatory Affairs & Applications Specialist
Orchard Software Corporation
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I still see nothing posted on the CMS website that show that CMS is going or has delayed the ruling on Physician Signatures on Laboratory Requisitions. Do you know if anything has changed or is about to do so?
I agree, let the CMS administrators come in and sit here with our accessioners and make them aware of the huge amount of work and calling this is going to cause every clinical laboratory. Recent question was from a local hospital and they wanted to know how they would get a physician’s signature on a laboratory requisition when the physician writes the orders in the chart and when at the patient’s bedside?
After reading Ms. Beccacio’s comment, we also noticed that the CMS has not yet officially posted a formal announcement about delaying the proposed rule on Physician Signatures. As we said in our blog post, CMS was supposed to make this announcement, but for some reason they have not.
After doing additional research on the CLMA and Dark Daily websites, we found both of the organizations publishing statements that CMS verified with them that there would be a delay until the end of the first quarter of 2011.
You can read the CLMA posting at http://www.clma.org/?page=Phy_Sig
You can read the Dark Daily posting at http://www.darkdaily.com/good-news-for-clinical-laboratories-as-cms-delays-physician%e2%80%99s-signature-requirement-1221
Thank you, Ms. Beccacio for bringing this to our attention. For all our readers, please feel free to comment on any of our blog posts for any further clarification on any topics we post about.