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• Abraham Andresen, Santa Fe College, Gainesville, FL
• Elizabeth Leahy, Hoffman Heart Institute School of Cardiac Ultrasound, Hartford, CT
• Vladimir Masati, Johns Hopkins School of Cardiac Ultrasound, Baltimore, MD
• Karin Ozowski, El Centro College, Dallas, TX
• Heidi Rivisto, Mayo School of Health Sciences -Echocardiography, Rochester, MN       

This free e-Valentine delivers your personal note and shows your loved one how much you care. The bonus? The card also gives your valentines a window into their heart, by linking to information provided by ASE, an organization dedicated to quality cardiovascular ultrasound.

With heart disease ranked as the number one killer in the United States and Valentine’s Day falling right in the middle of National Heart Month, why not send a Valentine that shows you care about the person inside and out?

Send one now!

The 2010 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule final rule was released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) late on Friday, Oct. 30. Despite the extraordinary opposition to the proposed reductions in cardiology services, CMS chose to incorporate the AMA Physician Practice Information Survey into its rate-setting formula. However, the results will be phased in over a four year period. The impact on TTE with spectral and color Doppler (CPT 93306) will be a reduction of about 10% in 2010; these reductions are scheduled to continue for four years. In fact, all cardiovascular imaging will undergo drastic Medicare payment reductions in 2010 as the result of the final rule. SPECT myocardial perfusion will be the hardest hit, with a 36% reduction in 2010, as the result of CMS’s decision to “bundle” add-on codes into the primary procedure and to implement the entire reduction in one year, rather than phasing it in over four years, as for other codes.

What’s next
Taken together with the payment cuts that echocardiography services have already experienced, CMS’ final rule represents a grave threat to the provision of high quality echocardiography services by physician practices. The ASE, in partnership with the ACC, will be pulling out all the stops to stop the practice expense cuts. ASE understands the very real impacts these cuts will have on your practices, your staff and your patients, and is exploring all the options for fighting implementation of the final rule.

NEW: Projected payments by code available here.

Question 2 results are:
23% of you chose B as the image that does not belong. Congratulations!
36% of you chose Answer D
32% chose C
9% chose A

Play our 3^rd question today. There will be prizes for the players with the most correct answers.

In addition, all attendees who have booked their housing through the ASE housing bureau and are staying at the Marriott can consider themselves "Wired for Business".  This package includes complimentary high speed internet in the guest rooms, and local and long distance phone calls!

Interested in the Omni? Two attendees who use ASE's housing bureau to book their rooms at the Omni San Diego Hotel, will be selected to win two Padres baseball tickets behind home plate for the night of either June 11th or 12th. Winners will be announced five days prior to arrival.   

As a thank you to our attendees, the Omni will provide a $10.00 per day food and beverage voucher AND complimentary high speed internet for all attendees who book rooms at the Omin San Diego Hotel through the ASE housing bureau (Vouchers do not include gratuity, alcoholic beverages, or breakfast in McCormick and Schmick's).

All offers are void for canceled reservations.

Book your hotel reservations now for the best rates and use the attendee access code, ASEATT0610. Rooms are based on availability.

Thanks for playing the ASE’s Online Three of a Kind!

Attending ACC.10?  Stop by ASE at booth #2463 and pick up your free ASE Guidelines CD.  ASE staff will be on-hand to answer any membership or education questions you may have.  Don't forget to ask about our wide variety of free CME opportunities and educational products including the popular ASE Guidelines Reference Book.

A bit of good news: both houses of Congress have passed a two-month freeze on the 21.5 percent conversion factor reduction in overall Medicare physician payment –a reduction that had been slated for Jan. 1, 2010, due to the flawed SGR update formula. It is anticipated that Congress will address the SGR issue in legislation early next year to preclude the conversion factor reduction from going into effect, at least for the rest of 2010. 

In the past few months ASE has more than doubled its allocation of resources for advocacy initiatives towards the battle to preserve Medicare reimbursement and the fight against private payer pre-certification for echocardiography, allowing the Society to:

•    Partner with the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and the ACC in hiring a well-connected legislative firm to reach out to legislators.
•    Conduct an in-depth analysis of CMS data and methodology.
•    Meet with both legislative leaders and CMS representatives to plead our case.
•    Launch extensive grassroots and public relations campaigns.
•    Work to negotiate alternatives to onerous pre-certification requirements.
•    Outline a plan for development of a point-of-order tool as an alternative to pre-certification.

Many of you, our members, made monetary contributions beyond your member dues specifically to help support these efforts.

ASE wants to be supportive of any effort that could positively affect the reversal of the proposed CMS cuts, and therefore has also made a substantial financial contribution to advance a lawsuit filed by the ACC against Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  A recent story in USA Today explains the lawsuit and the hopes the plaintiffs and supporters of it have for relief from very onerous cuts to Medicare reimbursement for cardiology.

Participation as a co-plaintiff on the ACC’s lawsuit would have exposed the Society to a financial commitment which is expected to be considerable and, depending on a variety of trial outcomes, could be ongoing for an extended period of time. We have capped our contribution at an amount which still allows us to maintain a more diverse strategy in fighting these cuts.  We plan to continue to have ongoing meetings with CMS, and to lobby on Capitol Hill for relief from a Physician Fee Schedule which, over the next four years, would have drastic implications for our members and the patients they serve.

The National Quality Forum has released a call for public comment on measures related to Imaging Efficiency. The American College of Cardiology's Quality in Technology (QT) working group of the Clinical Quality Committee has developed a draft set of appropriate use measures based on the SPECT MPI and stress echo appropriate use criteria. It is expected that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Lewin Group will submit a similar set of measures as well; however, the CMS/Lewin measures are based solely on claims data. As a result, those measures are fatally flawed as there is no way to determine patient status items such as symptom status at the time of the test.

As an alternative, the ACC is proposing measures to be based on clinical data.

Please review the ACC proposal and submit comments. It is highly likely that some measures will be used in the future to determine your performance and as terms of reimbursement so now is the time to weigh in.  The deadline for submission is Dec. 8 at 5 p.m. ET. Review and submit your comments now