The Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee of the CMS voted that it has moderate confidence that there is sufficient evidence for at least one intervention that improves most forms of lower-extremity peripheral artery disease.
The panel’s vote could serve as a basis for a National Coverage Decision from the CMS. There is currently no CMS national coverage pertaining to therapies for lower-extremity PAD, though some are covered on a state-by-state basis,Tamara Syrek Jensen, JD, director of CMS’ coverage and analysis group, said at the meeting.
Moderate confidence
After a review of the existing evidence, the panel voted that it has low confidence that there is sufficient evidence for at least one intervention that improves asymptomatic PAD in the short term; moderate confidence that there is sufficient evidence for at least one intervention that improves asymptomatic PAD in the long term, intermittent claudication in the short and long term and critical limb ischemia (CLI) in the long term; and moderate-to-high confidence that there is sufficient evidence for at least one intervention that improves CLI in the short term.
“We have a conflict between what we know logically should work [and] data that … just aren’t very good,” panel member Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the National Center for Health Research Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund, said. She was one of several panelists who emphasized the need for more long-term data. […]
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