Medicare wants to standardize new HHAs’ capitalization amounts. If you’re waiting on your Medicare enrollment to process, you might be in for a surprise. That’s because your regional home health intermediary might make a change to the capitalization amount required of…

Plus: Don’t abandon your old HHABN yet, CMS says in forum. The feds are eliminating at least one point of OASIS C confusion. Previously, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued an “errata” sheet making corrections to the OASIS C…

Physician number edits threaten DME claims. Suppliers have a few more months to get up to speed on physician number edits that will hit in April, but that won’t help if ordering physicians don’t bother to register in PECOS. Starting April 5,…

Physician number edits threaten DME claims. Suppliers have a few more months to get up to speed on physician number edits that will hit in April, but that won’t help if ordering physicians don’t bother to register in PECOS. Starting April 5,…

HHAs, hospices, and DME suppliers all affected by new audit focus areas. Home health agencies and hospices may not technically be under Recovery Audit Contractor reviews just yet, but current issues that at least one RAC is investigating are already affecting…

Throw out this coding convention when deciding on diagnosis codes for the new OASIS C item. If you follow one coding guideline by filling out M1024 without taking reimbursement into account as the feds say, you’ll actually be going against another…

Are you reporting the new required data on your hospice claims? Now that hospices must report additional claims detail for visits with the appropriate revenue codes and HCPCS codes, there are also new reason codes for related returned to provider (RTP’d)…

Double digit profit margins drive advisory body’s recommendation for cuts. If MedPAC gets its way, you’ll be seeing significantly less reimbursement starting next year. In its Jan. 14 meeting, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission voted to tell lawmakers to eliminate the inflation update…

For home health agencies Recommendation 1: The Congress should eliminate the market basket update for 2011 and direct the Secretary to rebase rates for home health care services to reflect the average cost of providing care. Recommendation 2A: The Congress should direct…

Longer LOS, more for-profits wear out hospice industry’s goodwill. MedPAC’s proposed cuts for hospices may not be as steep as for some other providers, but they’ll still cut deep next year if Congress heeds the advisory body’s new recommendations. In a Jan.…