Clinical Practice Committee
The Clinical Practice Committee has a rather open agenda, but deals with clinical issues confronted by physicians who consult with patients who have disorders of motility. The committee has worked with the following issues in the last few years:

1. Clinical Testing — There are a variety of clinical tests of motor activity of the gastrointestinal organs. These tests have emerged from research laboratories and many of them have gradually been integrated into clinical practice. Some are well accepted and used in the diagnosis and management of a variety of disorders. Others are less well accepted and their place in clinical practice is less certain. Esophageal manometry has a long history of use in the clinical laboratory, but even this test has never been standardized. The committee developed a process to define minimum standards of practice for a number of clinical motility tests. The American Motility Society worked in collaboration with the European Neurogastroenterology and Motility Society to come to a consensus on standard practices for these motility tests. The various manuscripts are published in the journal of the two societies, Neurogastroenterology and Motility.

2. Billing and coding of procedures is a critically important issue for the performance, interpretation and utilization of motility tests in clinical practice. The committee has worked together with the AGA’s Clinical Practice and Practice Economics Committee to improve and increase the number of codes and to increase the relative value units for accepted procedure codes. An article describing the billing and coding issues has been published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology. A column on these issues is published regularly in the newsletter, The Recorder, and on the AMS website.

3. Members of the AMS have worked with the AGA to develop standards of training in the area of neurogastroenterology and motility. These objectives have been published in the April issue of Gastroenterology.

4. The committee is currently working on the issue of quality control of clinical laboratories that perform and analyze clinical tests of motility. The background, training and experience of laboratory directors and technical personnel become important issues in considering quality control. The committee is considering registration and listing of laboratories that regularly conduct clinical tests in order to provide information about the availability of experienced laboratories that perform high quality studies.