On June 4, 2012, CMS is expected to release a national provider Comparative Billing Report (CBR) prepared by SafeGuard Services, which is under contract with CMS, to address Evaluation and Management (E&M) Services. A CBR, which is only available to the providers that receive them, analyzes a provider's billing pattern for various procedures or services and compares that billing to that of the provider's peers. CMS authorized SafeGuard to produce nationwide CBRs beginning in 2010, and since that time, SafeGuard has developed topics for study, including E&M.
Once a study has been completed using Medicare data, the CBR is submitted to providers studied under a particular topic, with no more than 5,000 providers selected per topic. Providers are given contact information for SafeGuard for any questions that arise as a result of the CBRs, which are intended to help providers identify errors in billing practices. In this particular CBR for E&M, the study will include all Medicare Part B final claims data with dates of service spanning January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011 that were retrieved from the Integrated Data Repository (IDR) on April 13, 2012 and meet certain criteria. For additional information on this study, including how a provider's peers are selected for comparative purposes, providers can visit the SafeGuard website, available here.
