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Home Health & Hospice Week

Audits:

6 Steps To Get Ready For A RAC Attack

Published on Fri Feb 05, 2010

Get specific with your patients' diagnoses. Here are steps you can take now to head off RAC audit-related problems down the road: • Strengthen documentation. "Has the hospice adequately and accurately determined and documented what services provided to the patient were and were not related to the terminal illness?" asks consultant Heather Wilson with Weatherbee Resources in Hyannis, Mass. Make sure your documentation makes this clear to avoid being on the hook for gray-area items and services. Hospices must "proactively set up good clinical systems to consistently determine what is truly unrelated to the terminal illness," counsels attorney Mary Michal with Reinhart Boerner VanDeuren in Madison, Wis. Then make sure the systems and decisions are well documented. • Encourage good documentation in your partners. In the nursing home patient medication scenario, a representative from your hospice and the home should go through the patients' medications and decide which ones are [...]
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