Finance: Report Costs For These Lines, Or Else
New Level 1 edits make these cost report lines mandatory. Without costs recorded on these lines in Worksheet A of the hospice cost report, Medicare won’t accept your report. Line … Continue Reading →
Category: Reimbursement
Hospice: Prepare To Get More Detailed In Your Hospice Cost Report
Note this big change to reporting drug costs. Newly released hospice cost report revisions may mean more work for you, but should result in more accurate data that will be … Continue Reading →
Billing: Make Sure You’re Ready For New Medicare Cards
Heed this advice on how to handle the MBI. If you use a common trick to get your patients’ correct HICN for billing, that option is going away. The Centers for … Continue Reading →
Quality: How Does Your Live Discharge Rate Stack Up To Your Peers?
New quality measure aims to ID discharges followed by hospitalization or death. Concerns about hospices discharging patients alive continue, and a newly proposed quality measure takes aim at the sore … Continue Reading →
Payment: MedPAC Thinks You Don’t Need A Rate Increase
LOS is on the rise again. Chances of you getting a decent payment rate increase next year are slimmer, thanks to a recent report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission once again … Continue Reading →
OASIS: Watch Out For These OASIS-D Trouble Spots
New GG items should top your priority list. If you think the changes coming to OASIS in January are relatively minor because they involve lots of dropped items and only … Continue Reading →
Diagnosis Coding: Stop Using ICD-9 As A Coding Crutch
Remember, you won’t get any more GEMs. Question: I often find myself coding ICD-9 in my head and then using a tool to “translate” to ICD-10, just because I’ve used ICD-9 … Continue Reading →
Managed Care: Watch For Business Opportunities As Medicare Allows MA Plans To Cover Aide Services
Key: Help show that aide services will ‘reduce avoidable emergency and healthcare utilization.’ Exactly how much a new broadening of the Medicare Advantage benefit rules will affect home care providers … Continue Reading →
Industry Note: Double-Check Who Is Signing Your Cost Reports
Some newly announced changes for home health agency cost reports may alter how you submit them. Transmittal 18, issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last month, updates Chapter 32, Home … Continue Reading →
Reimbursement: Turn Audit Losses Into Cap Gains
If you’re a hospice provider that’s been hit with an overpayment request from a Recovery Audit or other government contractor, and you’ve exceeded your per beneficiary cap, there may be … Continue Reading →