Outgoing Government Affairs Committee Chair Blair Solow, MD, offers advocacy updates from 2022 and seasonal reflections on how to stay focused on efforts that matter when faced with daunting challenges.
ACR Convergence 2022 will offer several opportunities to learn to leverage your expertise to support the rheumatology community, keep practices solvent and improve care of patients with rheumatic diseases. Look for sessions that explore why and how to pursue effective rheumatology advocacy and how to turn challenges into actionable results.
RheumPAC has been working to ensure that individual legislators understand what rheumatology practices and patients face when it comes to delivering high quality care to those with rheumatic diseases and advocating for policies to support affordability of care, workforce expansion, prior authorization reform and fair reimbursement levels.
In recent months, the ISC has engaged with payers to reduce administrative burden on practices and continues to advocate to the CMS for the use of complex administration codes for biologics.
Ongoing ACR advocacy efforts are working to keep biologic drugs accessible to rheumatology patients, defending the ability of rheumatology practices to use the complex chemotherapy codes for administration of biologic therapies.
The ACR and a new Access to Reproductive Health Care Task Force are working to ensure patients with rheumatic disease—particularly women—have access to the medications and treatments they need, including methotrexate, and that rheumatology providers are able to maintain trusting relationships with and advise their patients on all matters relevant to the management of their rheumatic diseases.
Cigna will not move forward with changes to their reimbursement policy for evaluation and management (E/M) codes submitted with modifier 25 as originally scheduled.
Practices that received Provider Relief Funds between April 10–June 30, 2020, and did not file a report may request to submit a late report and avoid having funds recouped.
In 1916, a handful of conservation advocates successfully lobbied Congress to create the National Park Service, which now protects more than 85 million acres of U.S. land. Dedicated rheumatology advocacy has lasting effects, too, as evidenced by several policy wins in 2021 and efforts underway for 2022.
The reassurance comes after ACR leadership sent a letter detailing how its prior authorization forms increased paperwork burden for many biologic drugs and hurt patients’ timely access to treatment.