Home Health & Hospice Week

The codes you put on your claims will help shape hospice payment reform, CMS warns.   If you're in the majority of hospices that put only the primary diagnosis on your hospice patients' Medicare claims, you'd better change your ways. So warns the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in its 2013 hospice wage index notice released July 24. "Hospice claims which only report a principal diagnosis are not providingan accurate description of the patients' conditions," CMS chastises in the notice scheduled for publication in the July 27 Federal Register. "Providers should code and report coexisting or additional diagnoses to more fully describe the Medicare patients they are treating." The ICD-9-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting require reporting of all additional or coexisting diagnoses, CMS points out. "HIPAA, federal regulations, and the Medicare hospice claims processing manual all require that these ICD-9-CM Coding Guidelines be applied to the coding [...]