ACC.11 & i2 Summit 2011 marked ACC’s 60th annual scientific session. With 60 years of successful history, it would be easy to simply drift meeting to meeting, circling endlessly into the backwaters of irrelevance. Not so. The ACC remains determined to transform the education we offer at this meeting to keep up with tremendous advances in science and radically changing education strategies. These educational changes include: recognition of learner needs (wherein what is taught focuses on what the learner needs rather than what the teacher wants to teach); the urgent need to optimize quality medical care for all patients; and the burgeoning requirements for life-long learning.

Given how much is changing, I asked our ACC.12 Program Chairs, Rick Nishimura, MD, FACC, and Patrick O’Gara, MD, FACC, to take a hard look at our meeting to enable it to meet these new needs. They have responded by making key changes so that the meeting concentrates on:

1. Promoting the science;
2. Facilitating physician competence
3. Using alternative long-distance learning strategies
4. Collaborating with subspecialty societies within the family of cardiology; and
5. Using cutting-edge technology to more fully engage younger, more facile members who not only have mastered the new math but can also surf the Web.

The overarching goal of all these changes is to continue the transformation of education and science – the underpinnings of the ACC. As we think about how the College plays a central role in these areas, there is a triangle beginning with bits and bytes of information, that is then collated and synthesized into knowledge, which is then applied—along with individual and aggregate experience—as wisdom to treat the patient at hand.  ACC.12 will be unlike any ACC meeting seen before as we showcase and teach the art and science of reasoning. 

More about the changes planned for the meeting can be found in the July/August issue of Cardiology magazine, in an interview with Nishimura and O’Gara. The interview is on page 28 of the flipper. You can also read more in the President Page’s in JACC.

The proposed 2012 Medicare Physician Payment Rule (formally called the Physician Fee Schedule) was issued just before the 4th of July weekend at 4:15 p.m. Friday. Why? So nobody will have time to read it and comment and complain until this week. The 2010 payment rule was devastatingly bad. The 2011 rule was nowhere near as bad as that, and this one for 2012 is not full of apparent surprises. The 2012 rule has the third year of residual cuts that originated in 2010, but the impact next year averages out about negative 1%. The big impact would be the SGR cut of 29.5% if it were not waived -- which it will be for a year at least I presume.

Here are some of the highlights from our initial review (more coming later this week):

• Imaging Payment Reductions: CMS proposes to reduce the payment by 50 percent for the professional component of certain imaging services provided at the same session on the same day by the same physician.
  
  
• Electronic Prescribing Penalty: By law, CMS is required to reduce Medicare payments to those practitioners who do not electronically prescribe and for whom at least 10 percent of their Medicare payments are associated with certain types of office visits. As part of the 2012 proposed rule, CMS is considering providing practitioners with an additional opportunity to avoid the penalty.
  
  
• Potentially Misvalued Services: CMS identifies three cardiology codes for review as potentially misvalued. Data for cardiovascular stress test (93015), extracranial study (93880), and complete electrocardiogram (93000), will be reviewed by the RUC for presentation to CMS before July 2012.
  
  
• Physician Compare and Value-Based Purchasing: CMS proposes another step towards the required implementation of value-based purchasing in 2015. In the proposed rule, CMS includes a series of claims-based measures that will be used to report on physician quality using the new Physician Compare website. In addition, CMS proposes a series of quality measures that will be used to adjust payment based on quality starting in 2015.
  
  
• Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) and Maintenance of Certification (MOC): CMS proposes some changes to PQRS but largely keeps intact the registry reporting that is commonly used by cardiologists. Physicians that successfully participate in PQRS in 2012 will receive a 0.5 percent bonus of Medicare payments.
  
  
• Coding: CMS, as expected, continues to move forward with bundling payments for certain services. Specific changes will not be available until November.

Read the full initial review on CardioSource.