Noted Clinical Laboratory and Anatomic Pathology Legal Experts Jane Pine Wood and Richard Cooper to Address 2017’s Important Changes in Legal, Compliance, and Managed Care Issues for Lab Industry
Medical labs must comply with PAMA lab test price market reporting in 2017, while pathologists will see big changes in Medicare physician payments because of MIPS
It is now budget-planning season for the medical laboratories of hospital and health systems. This fall, lab administrators report grim news as they try to anticipate all the changes coming to the clinical laboratory industry in 2017—just 11 weeks away.
There is a growing consensus among lab executives and pathologists who are the business leaders of their groups that labs will not see any relief in 2017 to the multi-year decline in lab test prices that actually intensified in the past 24 months.
One factor is their assessment of the coverage and pricing decisions being made by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) for specialty lab tests. The other factor is their experience with private payers who continue excluding local clinical labs from narrow networks and who insist on price cuts when managed care contracts are renewed. (more…)
