Advocacy & Practice Updates — Advocacy & Practice
HHS OIG: Global Surgery Postoperative Visits Inaccurately Reported, Overvalued
This afternoon, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report, CMS Should Improve Its Methodology for Collecting Medicare Postoperative Visit Data on Global Surgeries. The report evaluates the effectiveness of CMS’ data collection effort on postoperative visits that began in 2017 and requires practitioners in groups of 10 or more located in certain states report a non-payable CPT code 99024 when post-op visits for selected high-volume global surgery services occur.
The report notes that CMS did not provide sufficient or clear information related to the data collection requirement, resulting in non-participation by some providers who would be subject to the requirement or confusion as to what services and how they should be reported. Despite that confusion, OIG maintains that submitted data from practitioners shows that they are often not furnishing as many post-op visits as are included in 10- and 90-day global surgery code valuations. OIG recommends CMS take action to revalue global surgery codes.
ASRS and the surgical community have long-opposed the global surgery data collection and urged CMS that the number and level of post-operative visits be solely determined by recommendations from the AMA’s Relative-Value Update Committee (RUC).
(Published 7.1.25)