2012 will bring important changes that will impact your practice. Join ASA staff in a webinar that will cover many of these changes that matter most to you, including:

· 2012 Medicare Conversion Factors
· CPT^® coding changes
· October 2013 Transition to ICD-10-CM/PCS
· Accountable Care Organizations
· ASA's response to two recent CMS rules:
o Reform of Hospital and Critical Access Hospital Conditions of Participation
o Regulatory Provisions to Promote Program Efficiency, Transparency, and Burden Reduction

Take the complexity out of coding for cardiac anesthesia with this important webinar. Learn about various factors that impact the selection of an anesthesia code and how to accurately report cardiac anesthesia services.

This webinar will discuss the National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) which is used by CMS and many private payers to determine proper coding.

Earn 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM

Take control of your personal and professional life. Join colleagues for an in-depth webinar discussion on physician burnout. Connect with Journal authors, Steve Alan Hyman, M.D., M.M. and Gildasio De Oliveira M.D, who report on findings and recommendations based on their studies of residents, physicians and anesthesiology chairs, scheduled to be published in the January issue of journal, ANESTHESIOLOGY.

Earn 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM

Speaker- Richard L. Wolman, M.D., M.A.

The relative shortage of viable organs led to reemergence of organ procurement from nonheartbeating organ donors (donation after cardiac death or DCD) in 1992. Despite relaxation of the strict criteria for DCD, administrative, legislative, and social proposals or changes to the organ donation process, DCD represented less than eleven percent of all deceased donors in 2008. Unfortunately, many of these attempts to increase the number DCD donors resulted in ethical and moral controversies and only increased the public's existing misperceptions and fears regarding organ donation and DCD.

Ethical dilemmas raised by DCD may be divided into those of a conceptual and practical nature. These dilemmas are confounded by the fact that DCD combines two morally complex events, decisions and care of the donor at the end of life (withdrawal of life-sustaining medical therapies) and the generous gift of organ donation. Thus, there may be problems and conflicts of interest in prioritization of care of the potential donor vs. that of the potential organ recipient, use of the presumptive approach to consent, possible violations of the donor's autonomous wishes, supremacy of donation over the donor's advance directives and end-of-life care wishes, decisions regarding who withdraws life-support, the premortem use of organ protection agents, definitions of death and the irreversibility of circulatory arrest in the age of resuscitation, and violations of the dead donor rule. These dilemmas may be reduced but not entirely eliminated by careful adherence to protocols that respect the rights, autonomous wishes, and care of the prospective donor and that avoid conflicts of interest.

Earn 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM

Join author, Steven Paul Cohen, M.D. for an informative discussion on his August, 2010 Journal ANESTHESIOLOGY article titled: "Multicenter, Randomized Comparative-Cost-Effectiveness Study Comparing 0, 1 and 2 Diagnostic Medial Branch (Facet Joint Nerve) Block Treatment Paradigms prior to Lumbar Facet Radiofrequency Denervation."

Earn 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)^TM

Life-sustaining therapies [pacemakers, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD), or ventricular assist devices (VAD)] are increasingly utilized. There may be times when patients as well as families approach physicians to withdraw or withhold life-sustaining therapies. The physician's comfort level as well as medical and legal issues can create concerns in granting a request to deactivate a pacemaker, ICD, or VAD. The discussion of deactivating these life-sustaining therapies ought to occur early in the care of a patient to avoid, for example, distressed families watching continuous defibrillating shocks in the final moments of life. We discuss the principle of autonomy as the patient's right to initiate, continue, or withdraw medical treatment; the difference between withdrawal and withholding medical treatment; the difference between withholding/withdrawing medical treatment and physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia; whether a DNR order should be interpreted as authorizing deactivation of life-sustaining treatments; and recommendations to address end-of-life issues with the placement of life-sustaining treatments.*

*Excerpted from Jericho BG, Morgenweck CJ. End of life issues: withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy. ASA Newsletter 2009; 73(9):24-25.