Thursday, February 2, 2017

Brief Blog: CMS Launches Clinical Lab Center Webpage

CMS announced the launch of a Clinical Labs Center webpage.

The webpage has modular organization and provides separate zones for key links for billing, coding, manualized lab policies.   The page includes link to common CMS websites like HCPCS and Transmittals.  

Quirkily, but helpfully, they provide several links to 2001 documents for "Negotiated Rulemaking for Labs."  This was intended to provide uniform national claims requirements so labs could submit claims similarly in all 50 states.  Ironically, 15 years later,  25 states follow special MolDx rules like Z codes (without which, claims are rejected as unprocessable) and 25 states don't.  

CMS has also done some webmastering of its CLFS Meetings page, which tended to have a jumbled collection of erratically named links at the bottom. Now there are clear links for things like this year Proposed and Final pricing recommendations, and handy ZIP files with back-years of annual pricing policies (2012-2016).   2015, 2016 gapfill determinations are listed here (Excel by MAC).

  • The new Clinical Lab Center Webpage here.
  • The improved CLFS Meetings page, here.