OIG announces new initiatives for ASCs

Editor's Note

The US Department of Health & Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its 2016 Work Plan announcing new initiatives for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), the ASCA News Digest reports.

The initiatives include:

• Review the appropriateness of Medicare’s methodology for setting ASC payment rates.
• Revitalize outdated evaluations that found problems with Medicare’s quality oversight system.
• Conduct two reviews of hospital owned ASCs: One to analyze the number of provider-based facilities that hospitals own and the extent to which Medicare has methods to oversee provider-based billing. The second to review and compare Medicare payments for physician office visits in provider-based clinics and freestanding clinics to determine the difference in payments made for similar procedures.