Home Health & Hospice Week

House hangs on to $20 million cut.

The U.S. House and Senate have approved their budget resolutions for 2006, and they have a big disagreement on Medicaid.

The Senate resolution originally included language directing the Senate Finance Committee to cut $15 billion from mandatory programs, of which $14 billion was expected to come from Medicaid, according to press reports. The House version included an expected $20 billion of similar cuts.

But on March 17, the Senate approved an amendment nixing the Medicaid cuts and instead proposing a study on Medicaid. The Senate passed its amended resolution that day, and the House passed its original version.

Now the bodies will duke it out in the reconciliation process to determine whether any of the Medicaid cuts are included in the final combined resolution.

"Many states face a Medicaid funding squeeze," notes the American Association for Homecare. "Homecare organizations have repeatedly made the case for making dollars go farther by devoting more Medicaid resources to homecare, which is patient-preferred and cost-effective," the association says in a release.  If you're using a computer from the Stone Age, you may have to upgrade by the end of this year. To accommodate the upcoming Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (QIES) in January 2006, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is transitioning to a new computer system and reporting software.

To access outcome-based quality improvement (OBQI) and error reports on the upgraded system, home health agencies have to meet new minimum system requirements by Dec. 31, says a March 10 memo to surveyors (S&C 05-22).

A recent CMS survey of nursing homes found about one-third of the facilities use computers that need upgrades to support the new software. Although CMS didn't survey HHAs, the agency said most systems at HHAs are likely due for an overhaul as well.

The memo, including the new system specs, is at www.cms.hhs.gov/medicaid/survey-cert/sc0522.pdf. 
  If your Return To Provider paper reports from intermediary Palmetto GBA haven't stopped coming yet, they will soon. Palmetto has discontinued paper RTP notices for HHAs in the Southeast and Southwest regions already, and now it's doing the same for agencies in Gulf Coast and Midwest areas, the intermediary says in its March newsletter to providers. Palmetto is eliminating the hard copy reports for Direct Data Entry (DDE) providers only on April 1, it says. 
  North Carolina is moving ahead with plans to toughen up surveys for home health agencies. The state House Health Committee gave a thumbs-up to a bill that will spend more than $1 million over the next two years to hire eight new survey workers and inspect agencies once every two years instead of three, reports the Winston-Salem Journal.

The bill also proposes to forbid HHAs from hiring workers listed as negligent [...]