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Lauren Nicola

Sep 16, 2026

5:42
So this is just so it was a long winded answer, but it's just to unpack that there's a whole host of activities that have to occur in order to responsibly incorporate this technology into practice.
5:54
Yeah, and just to bring back to the economics of all of that, I think kind of the summary of what Christophe just said was that it's a lot of work, right? It's a lot of work, a lot of effort.
6:04
What we've been trying to do in the ACR economics team is to help Medicare realize that that is physician work, right? It may not be per patient work per se, but it's work.
6:13
It's physician work that should be compensated and reimbursed.
6:15
Now, how you package that in a way that fits their paradigm of reimbursement, like it's not really category one CPT type work, Is it indirect practice that spends work or how can we approach that to get some kind of dollar amount on it? But it's reasonable to think that that physicians and practices should be reimbursed for this work because it's really important for the patients.
6:34
Right.
6:34
I mean, it's not just that we are doing it for fun.
11:27
possibly.
1:23
From your perspective, what are key contributing factors for this?
1:27
So I think probably for the purpose of this conversation, it helps to take one step back and explain the different ways that Medicare pays for things.
1:35
So there's three main payment policies or programs that Medicare uses.
1:41
One of them is the Category 1 CPT system in the physician fee schedule.
1:46
So you can get a Category 1 CPT code that gets a payment assigned at the RUC.
1:50
And that's how physicians get payment and physician offices get payment.
1:53
So that's one category.

8 MINS LATER

9:40
Dr. Nicole, I wanted to get back, you kind of mentioned this, in your initial comments, but I wanted to see if you could talk about the different thresholds for CPT category one and CPT category three codes with respect to AI and radiology.

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