A Review of the Utilization of RVU's in Nuclear Medicine

Objectives: The relative value unit (RVU) was developed by Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to guide reimbursements for rendered medical services through assigning an arbitrary value to each medical activity. Despite its inherent imperfections and shortcomings, many radiology practices apply the RVU as a metric to efficiently monitor productivity amongst the members of the department to best improve profitability and efficient patient directed. However, many nuclear medicine physicians, radiologists and other healthcare providers are limited in understanding regarding the plethora of weighted factors that compose the RVU determination for a given medical procedure. It is used by managers to obtain benchmarks for salary and supply costs. It’s something that is often contemplated, but rarely openly discussed amongst radiologists and other providers.

Methods: Our exhibit seeks to educate nuclear medicine physicians and radiologists and other medical practitioners alike to the applications of the RVU system, specifically with regards to reimbursement within the nuclear medicine department. We discuss

Results: The ability to evaluate clinical staff for productivity and work performance has become important for evaluating nuclear medicine staff for compensation, budgeting and future expansion of departments. We discuss the concepts of RVU’s and how it is utilized to measure productivity as a benchmark. We discuss the various drawbacks of this tool and how it is utilized for cost segmentation. We will discuss nuances with regards to the RVU system applied to both academic departments and private radiology practices alike.

Conclusions: Reimbursement policy is a strong motivation in the delivery of high-quality medical care and patient access. Ideally, a reimbursement policy should factor in the potential complexity of an individual case, sophistication of the utilized medical resources, and account for the efficiency of services provided and risk of adverse outcomes. References: Mezrich R, Nagy PG. “The Academic RVU: A System for Measuring Academic Productivity.” J Am Coll Radiol (2007). 4:471-478. Duszak R, Muroff LR. “Measuring and Managing Radiologist Productivity, Part 1: Clinical Metrics and Benchmarks.” J Am Coll Radiol. (2010). 7:452-458. Duszak R, Muroff LR. “Measuring and Managing Radiologist Productivity, Part 2: Beyond the Clinical Numbers.” J Am Coll Radiol. (2010). 7:482-489. Rosenkrantz A, Silva E, Hawkins M. “Relativity Screens for Misvalued Medical Services: Impact on Noninvasive Diagnostic Radiology.” J Am Coll Radiol. (2017). 14:1412-1418.