Home Health & Hospice Week

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services already has conducted a test run of some of the new enrollment proposals on durable medical equipment suppliers.

Suppliers have been under the requirement to bill at least once every six months from the National Supplier Clearinghouse, says billing expert Lisa Thomas-Payne with Albuquerque, NM-based Medical Reimbursement Systems. The NSC is CMS' contractor for DME supplier enrollment.

A supplier who doesn't bill for six months likely isn't doing any Medicare business anyway, Thomas-Payne maintains. Revoking the supplier's billing number "would generally not affect a supplier's ability to do business with other payers," Thomas-Payne points out, and therefore wouldn't affect overall business.

The NSC revoked about 1,500 supplier billing numbers when it checked suppliers' phone numbers against a national directory, CMS says in the proposed rule (see related story, this page). It estimates it saved Medicare $7 million in the process. And the NSC revoked about 800 more supplier numbers through site visits just in 1998.

But many suppliers let their old billing numbers time out through the deactivation process, Thomas-Payne points out. "If the NSC revokes a number that has been dead for six months, what did they save the Medicare program?" she asks.