Home Health & Hospice Week

Respite care, social work visit details revealed in Open Door Forum.

Confusion about how hospices should report visits under new data requirements persists, but at least a few aspects are getting clearer.

Hospices don't have to worry about reporting visits that aren't from their employees when a patient is receiving inpatient respite care, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a recently posted question-and-answer. "The hospice should only count the visits made by its employees," CMS says in the Q&A.

This goes along with CMS' recent suspension of visit reporting for non-hospice staff (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVII, No. 17).

Hospices should remember to report all visits for hospice staff, regardless of location, a CMS representative stressed in the May 13 Open Door Forum for home care providers.

Phone calls don't count: One forum caller asked whether social worker phone calls to families count as visits, since social workers are rarely able to orchestrate a face-to-face meeting with family members. Only in-person visits count for visit data reporting, a CMS staffer replied.

Can you bill? A snafu in the Medicare claim system recently caused hospices to suspend reporting visit data, which isn't required until July 1. A fix for that problem was implemented May 5, reported CMS' Wil Gehne in the forum, so hospices should be able to test visit data submissions.

But one hospice calling into the forum reported that its intermediary was instructing it not to report the visit data until July 1.

Other issues addressed in the forum include: • Physician signatures. CMS will not accept stamped physician signatures for any reason, CMS' Randy Throndset reminded forum participants. And hospices must be able to "produce a hard copy" of the physician's signature that can be authenticated for terminal illness certification, Throndset added.

CMS plans to clarify the physician signature issue in an upcoming question-and-answer, he said. • COPs. The hospice conditions of participation are in the clearance process, reported CMS' Kim Roche. The agency is hopeful that the COPs will be out by May 28, the deadline which requires a re-proposal of the regulations.