Reports on Insurance from Rutgers University-New Brunswick Provide New Insights (Practice Billing for Medicare Advance Care Planning Across the Usa): Insurance

2023 NOV 01 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Investigators publish new report on Insurance. According to news reporting originating from New Brunswick, New Jersey, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Medicare introduced billing codes in 2016 to encourage clinicians to engage in advance care planning (ACP) and promote goal-concordantend-of-life care, but uptake has been modest. While prior research examined individual-level factors in ACP billing, organization-level factors associated with physician practices billing for ACP remain unknown.”

Financial supporters for this research include NIH National Institute on Aging (NIA), NIH National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR).

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, “Examine the role of practices in ACP billing. Retrospective cohort study analyzing 2016-2018 national Medicare data. A total of 53,926 practices with at least 10 attributed Medicare beneficiaries. Outcomes were practice-level ACP billing (any use by the practice) and ACP use rate by practice-attributed beneficiaries. Practice characteristics were number of beneficiaries attributed to the practice; percentage of beneficiaries by race, Medicare-Medicaid dual enrollment, sex, and age; practice size; and specialty mix. Fifteen percent of practices billed for ACP. In adjusted models, we found higher odds of ACP billing and higher ACP use rates among practices with more primary care physicians (billing AOR: 10.01, 95%CI: 8.81-11.38 for practices with 75-100% (vs 0) primary care physicians), and those serving more Medicare beneficiaries (billing AOR: 4.55, 95%CI 4.08-5.08 for practices with highest (vs lowest) quintile of beneficiaries), and larger shares of female beneficiaries (billing AOR: 3.06, 95% CI 2.01-4.67 for 75-100% (vs <25%) female ). Several years after Medicare introduced ACP reimbursements for physicians, relatively few practices bill for ACP. ACP billing was more likely in large practices with a greater percentage of primary care physicians.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “To increase ACP billing uptake, policymakers and health system leaders might target interventions to larger practices where a small number of physicians already bill for ACP and to specialty practices that serve as the primary source of care for seriously ill patients.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Practice Billing for Medicare Advance Care Planning Across the Usa. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2022;37(15):3869-3876. Journal of General Internal Medicine can be contacted at: Springer, One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, Ny, United States. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; Journal of General Internal Medicine - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1525-1497)

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Elizabeth A. Luth, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, New Brunswick, NJ 08854, United States. Additional authors for this research include Adoma Manful, Joel S. Weissman, Amanda Reich, Keren Ladin, Robert Semco and Ishani Ganguli.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-022-07404-9. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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