Summary With civil monetary penalties, assessments and exclusions based on prohibited conduct and violations of healthcare laws on the rise, anesthesia and pain groups might consider enhancing efforts to improve practice compliance and documentation in 2018. We provide several examples of settlement agreements reported by the Health and Human Servi...

We close the year with a glance back at some of the most significant healthcare- and anesthesia-related developments of 2017. The word of the year in health law and bioethics was "uncertainty," Carmel Schacar and I. Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School proclaimed on Health Affairs' blog. The same might well be said of the healthcare sector as a whole ...

• The 2018 CPT edition includes 170 new CPT codes, 60 revised codes and 82 deleted codes along with two new modifiers. It is important to understand the changes and what should be documented to support the utilization of these codes.• The majority of the changes for 2018 were new CPT codes added to the Surgery section, Pathology/Laboratory section ...

First described in 2001, the transverse abdominis plane (TAP) block is a peripheral nerve block designed to anesthetize the nerves supplying the anterior abdominal wall (T6 to L1). In a 2011 meta-analysis, the TAP block was shown to reduce the need for postoperative opioid use, increase the time to first request for further analgesia and provide mo...

The 2018 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) (published in the Federal Register on November 15, 2017) contains significant reductions in the work values for several flat-fee ancillary services. Flat-fee services are those for which payment is determined under the Resource Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) and for which time is not a factor in determining...