In response to a request from the Social Security Administration (SSA), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will form an ad hoc committee to:
1. Identify and describe new or improved diagnostic or evaluative techniques for assessing physical disabling impairments in the Cardiovascular, Neurological, Respiratory, Hematological, and Digestive body systems, including primary headache disorders, that have become generally available within the last 30 years. The term, “generally available” for these purposes, is defined as being qualified for reimbursement under Medicaid or accessible to a majority of qualified health care providers in the United States. A new or improved diagnostic or evaluative technique should offer diagnostic or evaluative information of a type or nature previously unavailable or that is substantially more precise or accurate than earlier techniques and have the potential to show that a previously evaluated impairment was either more or less severe than was found at SSA’s Comparison Point Decision. Examples may include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and the six-minute walk test (6MWT).
2. The committee shall describe the following for the techniques identified under objective 1:
a. Accepted uses for the technique;
b. How the technique represents an advancement in either diagnostic or evaluative ability from previously available techniques and whether this improved ability is seen with equally strong effect among different racial, ethnic, or gender sub-populations in the United States;
c. Examples of specific impairments that are more accurately assessed with the new or improved technique;
d. The approximate date (i.e., month/year) the technique became generally available and evidence for selecting that date;
e. Known disparities in current access to the technique among various sub-populations in the United States along racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or geographic lines;
f. Specific drawbacks or limitations of the previously used, replaced or improved techniques and how those factors could have led to inaccurate findings about a person’s health;
g. Range of outcomes generally seen on the identified technique and what those outcomes reveal about their subject or that subject’s underlying impairments;
h. Standard requirements, such as who can administer the technique or interpret its results, conditions under which the technique is meant to be performed, and potential impacts to accuracy or validity when performed under other conditions;
i. Impediments to increasingly widespread use of the technique as a medical best-practice; and
j. Known limitations of the identified technique's diagnostic or evaluative efficacy and whether those limitations can be mitigated, for instance, with the use of other currently available evaluative or diagnostic techniques to complement, correct, or add confidence in measures from the identified technique.