On July 15, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a unilateral decision to implement a new sweeping mandate to collect data about global surgery services. According to the proposal (pp. 46192-46200), beginning just five months from now on Jan. 1, 2017, surgeons providing 10- and 90-day global surgery services to Medicare patients will be required to report a whole new set of codes to document the type, level and number of pre- and post-operative visits furnished during the global period for every global surgery procedure provided to Medicare beneficiaries. Under this system, surgeons would be required to use a new set of G-codes to report on each 10-minute increment of services provided.

In an effort to demonstrate to CMS the enormity of this task and its impact on patient care delivery, the surgical community has launched this survey to collect information that will help with our advocacy efforts opposing this overly burdensome and unfunded data collection effort.

Please contact TOA (Bobby@toa.org) for a link to the survey by August 24, 2016.