Home Health & Hospice Week

Are you on track to hit the HIS benchmark in the New Year?

How are you doing on your Hospice Item Set submissions? The answer can cost you reimbursement.

Reminder: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services required hospices to begin reporting HIS data for all admissions July 1, 2014 and later, or face a 2 percent payment reduction starting in January 2016. As of Jan. 1, if you fail to submit at least 70 percent of all required HIS records within a 30-day submission timeframe, you’ll face a 2 percent reduction to your market basket update for Fiscal Year 2018. That threshold goes up to 80 percent in 2017 and 90 percent in 2018, according to the 2016 hospice final rule published in the Aug. 6 Federal Register.

“Certification And Survey Provider Enhanced Reports (CASPER) reports are available to help monitor the status of HIS records, allowing providers to connect electronically to the National Reporting Database,” CMS says in a new message to providers. “Current CASPER reports allow providers to track HIS record status and determine when correction of errors is needed.”

Tool: Four training modules on the data reporting tool, covering the HIS Manual v1.02 and the various sections of the tool are in links at CMS’s youtube channel online at www.cms.gov/Outreachand-Education/Outreach/NPC/NPC-Video-Presentations.html.