Home Health & Hospice Week

Agencies won't get proper credit for patients' conditions if CMS finalizes coding revision.Proposed changes to M1024 -- Payment diagnoses have home care providers up in arms. Commenters on the 2013 home health prospective payment system proposed rule came out in force against these drastic case mix changes.In the rule published in the July 13 Federal Register, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reveals plans to alter the home health PPS grouper logic behind M1024 in two ways:1. Restricting M1024 for use with fracture codes alone. "We propose to restrict M1024 to only permit fracture (V-code) diagnoses codes which according to ICD-9-CM coding guidelines cannot be reported in a home health setting as a primary or secondary diagnosis. To further ensure compliance with proper coding guidelines, we propose to pair the fracture codes (V-code) with appropriate diagnosis codes and only when these pairings appear in the primary and payment diagnosis fields [...]