Home Health Line
08/28/2017
CMS has decided to prevent Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) and other reviewers from hiring any new LPNs to perform complex medical reviews to make coverage determinations.
08/28/2017
CMS’ inaugural release of Hospice Compare uncovers several opportunities for hospices to stand apart from competition. Among them: Ensuring patients treated with an opioid are given a bowel regimen.
08/28/2017
Six of the seven measures within the initial release of Hospice Compare earned scores of 93.3% or higher. However, a measure involving pain assessments only scored 77.7%.
08/25/2017
by: CMS
CMS has posted the following Q&As on a new webpage to better explain maintenance therapy and the Jimmo settlement agreement.
08/24/2017
If you’re one of the agencies that had high denial rates in CMS’ probe-and-educate review, brace yourself. Some agencies will have 20 to 40 claims reviewed for face-to-face documentation among other things this fall as part of CMS’ next step in the probe-and-educate process.
08/21/2017
by: Katherine J. Vanderhorst and Amy Craven
As part of a routine assessment for all patients, agencies should begin conducting a Brief Interview for Mental Status (BIMS) to detect patients’ cognitive impairments.
08/21/2017
The rehospitalization rate for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery patients receiving home care dipped by more than 1% when comparing 2015 and 2016, but there are still more steps agencies can take to reduce rehospitalization rates even more.
08/21/2017
The revised OASIS-C2 guidance manual encourages clinicians to collaborate with the patient, caregivers and other health care personnel on all OASIS data items within the comprehensive assessment.
08/21/2017
Have clinicians sign an agreement that they will comply with tablet policies as a condition of employment. This will keep protected health information (PHI) safe and help your agency avoid unnecessary risk.
08/21/2017
Conditions linked in the alphabetic index by the word “in” should be considered related even without provider documentation of such, making it equivalent to the way conditions are now linked by the “with” convention. This will be the case as of Oct. 1, when the FY2018 official coding guidelines go into effect.

Login

User Name:
Password: