What Is An Rvu

Median survival is a statistic that refers to how long patients survive with a disease in general or after a certain treatment.
What is an rvu. It is a number that defines the volume of work doctors perform when treating patients for all procedures and services covered under the physician fee schedule. Physician work rvu including the time and clinical skill necessary to treat a patient during an encounter. Relative value units rvus january 12 2015 medicare uses a physician fee schedule to determine payments for over 7 500 physician services. Rvus are the basic component of the resource based relative value scale rbrvs which is a methodology used by the centers for medicare medicaid services cms and private payers to determine physician payment.
Relative value units rvus rvus capture the three following components of patient care. Rvus are a part of the resource based relative value scale rbrvs. The work rvu calculator provides quick analysis of work relative value units associated with cpt and hcpcs level ii codes. Broken into three components rvus the geographical adjustment and the conversion factor.
The three component rvus are. These resources include the physician s work the expenses of the. Using the nationally applicable cpt to relative value unit rvu conversion of 1 x 88309 cpt 2 8 rvu the multipliers used by sinard et al1 translate into 23 8 rvu for an adult autopsy and 16 8 rvu for a perinatal autopsy both of them including brain examination and clinicopathologic correlation discussion. Basically relative value units rvus is a standard set by medicare to determine the amount to pay doctors depending on their productivity.
The fee for each service depends on its relative value units rvus which rank on a common scale the resources used to provide each service. Physician work rvu the relative level of time skill training and intensity to provide a given service. By entering the appropriate code and number of units associated with it you will receive the total work rvus and individual work rvu value for that code. It is the time expressed in months or years when half the patients are expected to be alive.
Before rvus were used medicare paid for physician services. An rvu represents the total of three component rvus each of which is adjusted based on the geographic location in which a physician practices.