Home Health & Hospice Week

Will your F2F documentation pass muster?A federal watchdog's investigation of home health agencies' face-to-face encounter compliance could get ugly fast, depending on how reviewers tackle the subject.In its newly released Work Plan for 2013, the HHS Office of Inspector General says it will "determine the extent to which home health agencies ... are complying" with the F2F requirement, which mandates an encounter with a qualifying doc or NPP up to 90 days before or 30 days after home care begins. Before the F2F requirement took effect, about 30 percent of home care patients met this standard, the OIG notes.The OIG's findings may be relatively positive if it focuses only on whether the patient met with the physician or NPP, observers expect. But if the OIG decides to focus on whether docs' F2F documentation complies, it could be a different story.The OIG's scrutiny of F2F is likely to lead to reimbursement [...]