Home Health & Hospice Week

HAA backs hospices in CMS’s proposed additional hospice data reporting.

You won’t have the slew of new hospice claims data reporting duties, if the Hospice Association of America gets its way.

The HAA -- an affiliate organization of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice -- issued comments on the proposed rule by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which would demand you capture a wide variety of data points relating to your hospice claims. These data points would include:

ü Visit data on paid chaplains.

ü Visit data on dietary and other counselors.

ü Visit data  including length of visits in 15-minute increments -- for nurses, aides, social workers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, chaplains, and counselors providing general inpatient or respite care to hospice patients in nursing homes or hospitals.

ü Reporting of visits and length of visits for nurses, aides, social workers, therapists, chaplains, and counselors that occur after the patient has passed away, on the calendar day of death.

ü Durable medical equipment data on the claims by reporting the 29X revenue code series and the appropriate DME HCPCS code for the time period covered by the claim.

ü Data on claims for non-routine medical supplies by reporting revenue codes 27X and 62X, with the supply charges totaled for the time period covered by the claim.

ü Data on injectable drugs, non-injectable prescription drugs, and over-the-counter drugs.

CMS proposed the additional data reporting back in December 2012, with the aim of using the data to refine the hospice payment system and evaluate trends in the utilization of the hospice Medicare benefit, NAHC explains.

Not surprisingly, the HAA is concerned about the burdens hospices would endure trying to collect and report all this additional data. "Should the additional data proposed be finalized there must be a significant notice and preparation time to hospices and other hospice stakeholders in order to develop the processes necessary to collect and report accurate data in a timely fashion," the HAA states.

"Our assessment, based on input from hospice programs, is that the burden of obtaining accurate and timely DME, non-routine supplies and OTC medication data would be most burdensome," the HAA says. "CMS should explore whether the detail necessary for payment reform might be obtained via hospice cost reports on a per-patient average basis by level of care. This type of additional data required on cost reports would be considerably less burdensome to hospices."