With all its enthusiastic talk about teamwork and coaches, the recently released Outcome-Based Quality Improvement Implementation Manual sounds ready to break out the pom-pons and megaphones. Home health agencies should start forming teams to navigate OBQI successfully, the Centers for Medicare &…

If your home health agency’s nurses and therapists go into panic mode when they reach the OASIS items addressing wounds, they could seriously wound your bottom line and even lead the feds to charge you with upcoding. “There is much…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to overhaul home health survey procedures drastically, and how you fare under the new system hinges largely on your OBQI report. Starting immediately, surveyors will use the new outcome-based quality improvement reports in preparation…

More OASIS-savvy clinicians could be just a voice mail away. In the ongoing quest for OASIS perfection, one home health agency has reached for the phone. The result: staff who understand each OASIS item more thoroughly, fewer inconsistencies and grinning employees…

Your agency’s first glimpse of the outcome -based quality improvement reports could wreak havoc on your staff if you don’t lay some groundwork ahead of time. Agencies might be caught off guard by staff members’ emotional reactions when they first encounter…

Home health agencies have been scrambling to choose outcomes for outcome-based quality improvement within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ suggested two-week timeline. That’s right: Within two weeks of the new OBQI reports’ availability, CMS said it wanted you to have…