Home Health & Hospice Week

Keep new regulatory costs in check with help from nurse practitioners. Hospice physicians will be putting on miles if a newly proposed Medicare rule for face-to-face encounters moves forward. The proposed rule, drawn from the Affordable Care Act, requires that each hospice patient has a face-to-face encounter with a hospice physician or nurse practitioner before her 180-day recertification and for each 60-day recertification period going forward. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services included the proposal in the July 23 Federal Register as part of the home health prospective payment system 2011 update. Hospice patients must have the face-to-face encounter with their certifying physician no more than 15 days prior to recertification, starting with the 180-day recert, CMS says in the proposed rule. The 180 days counts across all hospices from which a patient has received services. Plus: A physician narrative associated with the recert "must include an explanation of why the [...]