Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS sheds light on face-to-face gray areas in new questions and answers. If you miss getting a hospice patient's faceto-face encounter visit in the 30 days before her third benefit period starts, more than reimbursement is at stake. You'll need to do a Medicare discharge and readmission. So said the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in a March 28 session at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's annual March on Washington conference. A recent question-and-answer set issued by CMS backs up this new instruction. Hospices have to terminate a Medicare episode when they don't secure the F2F in time, CMS's Lori Anderson explained. Then they can start back up when the F2F is completed. That means the hospice will have to do a full readmission, Anderson said in response to a question from an attendee. "It would be a break in service," she said. "There's no wiggle [...]