In a recent blog post, we offered five key takeaways from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS’s) new 1,300-page proposed 2021 Medicare physician payment rule. Since the release of that rule a few weeks ago, much of our industry’s attention has been focused on the telehealth policy proposals, and more specifically, on which COVID-19 emergency telehealth policies CMS plans to make permanent after the emergency ends. This attention is well-deserved given the critical role that telehealth has played during the pandemic and the key role that CMS’s emergency policies played in enabling the rapid transition to telehealth services earlier this year. But beyond telehealth, CMS’s new regulation also includes very important Evaluation and Management (E/M) office visit coding, documentation, and payment system reforms that have been several years (if not decades) in the making. In the 2020 Physician Fee Schedule final rule that was released last November, CMS finalized an overhaul of the five-level documentation, coding, and payment system for Medicare E/M outpatient office visits. To provide the industry time to prepare for such a significant transition, the overhaul was scheduled for 2021, rather than 2020.