Home Health & Hospice Week

Clinicians will welcome the changes with open arms, experts predict.

These are some of the most critical changes that will occur in the updated OASIS assessment tool that takes effect Jan. 1, according to OASIS expert Lisa Selman-Holman of Selman-Holman & Asso-ciates and CoDR — Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas:

• Minor changes include substituting "for example" for e.g., "specifically" for i.e. and always capitalizing Unstageable (and removing quotation marks). In the OASIS-C1, CMS refers to non-adherence rather than non-compliance in an effort to indicate more patient autonomy. "Most changes will be simple because Medicare is clarifying what they have already indicated as intention in previous Q&As," Selman-Holman says. "However, sometimes new items will take more training,"
• One new item: M1309 — Worsening in Pressure Ulcer Status since SOC/ROC.
• Modified response options for M1308. The second column and the word non-epithelialized will be removed.
• Modified response option for M1334. Status of Most Problematic Stasis Ulcer will have ‘0’ for newly epithelialized removed. This item was an error and needed to be corrected since stasis ulcers, once epithelialized, are no longer there.
• Modified response options for M1910 — Has this patient had a multi-factor Falls Risk Assessment using a standardized, validated assessment tool? The answer descriptions will be changed to make the intent more clear.

"The changes in OASIS-C1 are all very positive for clinicians and will likely produce better outcomes because clinicians will understand them better and answer the OASIS questions more accurately," says nurse consultant Lynda Laff with Laff Associates in Hilton Head Island, S.C.