Summary: Medicare pays for assistant-atsurgery services under both the hospital inpatient prospective payment system and the physician fee schedule. Payments under the physician fee schedule are limited to a few health professions. In 2001, Congress directed GAO to report on the potential impact on the Medicare program of allowing physician fee schedule payments to Certified Registered Nurse First Assistants for assistant-at-surgery services. This report examines: (1) who serves as an assistant-atsurgery, (2) whether health professionals who perform the role must meet a uniform set of professional requirements, and (3) whether Medicare's payment policies for assistants-at-surgery are consistent with the goals of the program and, if not, whether there are alternatives that would help attain those goals. GAO analyzed information provided by physician and other health professional associations and Medicare payment data.
Members of a wide range of health professions serve as assistants-at-surgery, including physicians, residents in training for licensure or board certification in a physician specialty, several different kinds of nurses, and members of several other health professions. Hospitals employ all the types of nonphysician health professionals who perform the role. Hospital employees likely serve as assistants-at-surgery for a majority of the procedures for which the American College of Surgeons says an assistant is "almost always" necessary. The number of assistant-at-surgery services performed by physicians and paid under the Medicare physician fee schedule has declined, while the number of such services performed by nonphysician health professionals eligible to receive payment under the physician fee schedule has increased. There is no widely accepted set of uniform requirements for experience and education that the health professionals who serve as assistants-at-surgery are required to meet. The health professions whose members provide assistant-at-surgery services have varying educational requirements. No state licenses all the health professionals who serve as assistants-at-surgery. Furthermore, the certification programs developed by the various nonphysician health professional groups whose members assist at surgery differ. GAO found that there was insufficient information about the quality of care provided by assistants-at-surgery generally, or by a specific type of health professional, to assess the adequacy of the requirements for members of a particular profession to perform the role. There are three flaws in Medicare's policies for paying assistants-at-surgery that prevent the payment system from meeting the program's goals of making appropriate payment for medically necessary services by qualified providers. First, because Medicare pays for assistant-at-surgery services under both the hospital inpatient prospective payment system and the physician fee schedule, and hospital payments for surgical care are not adjusted when an assistant receives payment under the physician fee schedule, Medicare may be paying too much for some hospital surgical care. Second, paying a health professional under the physician fee schedule to be an assistant-at-surgery, instead of including this payment in an all-inclusive payment, gives neither the hospital nor surgeon an incentive to use an assistant only when one is medically necessary. Third, the distinctions between those health professionals eligible for payment as an assistant-at-surgery under the physician fee schedule and those who are not eligible are not based on surgical education or experience as an assistant. Criteria for determining who should be paid as assistants-at-surgery under the physician fee schedule do not exist. However, hospitals are responsible under health and safety rules to provide quality care for their patients.
