Home Health & Hospice Week

Secondary diagnoses clarifications could cut down on confusion. Home health agencies are finally getting some answers about recent CMS guidance on diagnosis coding, and those answers could help their payment and outcomes. In December the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued Attachment D to the OASIS User's Manual. The attachment contains guidance for filling out the diagnosis coding-related M0 items in OASIS. But many of the provisions in the guidance left HHAs scratching their heads. Last month CMS issued one correction to the chapter (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVIII, No. 5, p. 36), and now it has issued more clarifications related to secondary diagnoses. First error: The first bullet in Section D (3) (b) "incorrectly omits specific secondary diagnosis instruction," CMS says on its home health Web site. The correct wording should be: "Ensure that the secondary diagnosis under consideration includes not only conditions actively addressed in the patient's [...]