As the U.S. population ages, hospitals and health systems around the country have been grappling with how to integrate advance care planning (ACP) into routine practice. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began paying physicians for ACP by introducing two new billing codes which allowed them to bill for up to 60 minutes of advance care planning conversations with their patients. At the time, some lawmakers expressed concern that the ACP billing codes could be overused and become a burden to the Medicare program. A team of researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice investigated the early uptake of the ACP billing codes by analyzing billing for seriously ill, hospitalized adults over 65 who were treated by a large national physician practice. They found that despite the fact that physicians employed by the practice received ACP training and small financial incentives for ACP documentation, the rate of billed ACP conversations was very low and that there was wide variation among physicians and practice sites.
* This article was originally published here
