The minimum experience that interventional cardiologists and surgeons would need to have to participate in a Medicare-covered transcatheter aortic valve replacement program under a proposal issued last month has many physicians worried that access to the promising new procedure could be overly restricted.
But the credentialing requirements in CMS’ national coverage proposal, released Feb. 2, are based on guidance from the main professional medical societies representing practitioners who will be performing the procedure, recently available in the U.S. via the November 2011 FDA-approval of Edwards Lifesciences’ Sapien valve. And those groups, the American College of Cardiology, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the American Association of Thoracic Surgery and the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, issued a
