Home Health & Hospice Week

System will automatically deny claims with more than three aide visits per week.

Legitimate home health agencies in the Miami area that serve patients with high aide needs have been slapped with a major burden.

As of March 1, the Medicare claims system started denying claims that contain three or more aide visits per week and qualify for outlier payments, according to a letter Medicare's home health Program Safe-guard Contractor in Florida, TriCenturion, faxed agencies in Miami-Dade County in mid-February.

HHAs can appeal denied claims for more aide visits, says TriCenturion in the letter obtained by Eli. But "TriCenturion may interview beneficiaries for whom appeals are filed as part of its normal review process," the PSC warns.

And TriCenturion will red flag "patterns of fraudulent appeals" for the HHS Office of Inspector General and Federal Bureau of Investigation, it says.

Good guys: "Honest [providers] are somewhat frustrated because they have patients who really need more visits," says Gene Tischer of the trade group Associated Home Health Industries of Florida. "They will continue to provide the care, and then appeal the denials to the extent their finances allow."

The industry generally applauds efforts to combat fraud and abuse, notes Burtonsville, MD-based health care attorney Elizabeth Hogue. But "automatic denials are always problematic because they penalize both those who are behaving appropriately and those who are not," Hogue says.

Post-pay reviews would be more fair, observers argue. "It is hard to understand why automatic denials are necessary," Hogue adds. Why wouldn't it work "at least as well to do retrospective reviews that result in denials when they are warranted?" Hogue asks.

Beneficiary advocacy group the Center for Medicare Advocacy is looking into the measure's impact on patients who need daily aide care, reports Mary St. Pierre with the National Association for Home Care & Hospice.

Automatic denials will require extra resources to appeal. "What a shame for those agencies that are serving patients appropriately," Hogue laments.

Bad guys: Meanwhile, the limit probably won't make much of a dent in the processes of fraudsters, Tischer worries. "The crooks, I imagine, will just adjust their visit frequencies and make a little less profit," Tischer tells Eli.

Coming your way? HHAs in other areas may see this kind of enforcement imposed on them in the future, observers warn. "I suspect that if it is happening in one home health abuse hot spot, it is happening in others as well," points out Bob Wardwell with the Visiting Nurse Associations of America. Shocking Stats Spark Denials The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services alerted the industry to outlier problems in Miami-Dade County when it raised the fixed dollar loss (FDL) outlier ratio from 0.67 to 0.89 in the prospective payment system final rule late last summer (see Eli's [...]