More Updates on Pulmonary Rehab Benefit Available

December 17, 2009

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has posted instructions to its Medicare contractors on the new pulmonary rehabilitation program benefit that takes effect January 1, 2010. The instructions provide additional information and examples of how to bill for 2 sessions of PR per day that were not included in the final rules.

The PR instructions can be found on pages 53–55 of this Update Transmittal.

These instructions are part of the hospital outpatient prospective payment 2010 update. Instructions regarding PR in the physician office setting have not yet been posted. We will keep you up-to-date as that information becomes available.  

For a more detailed background on the new benefit, including links to the Final Medicare Regulations review our previous story. In addition to describing the benefit, these links are provided to the regulations as published in the Federal Register.

(These are large .pdf files; be patient while they load.)

Physician fee schedule
Pages 61879-61886 (overall provisions), 62002-62003 (summary text).

Hospital outpatient provisions
Pages 60566-60574 (payment/supervision), 60575-60591 (comments/supervision summary).

Also for more information,  Dr. Brian Carlin presented a webcast (November 11, 2009) on the new pulmonary rehabilitation benefit. AARC members can watch, free of charge, this important archived webcast for more information.