Home Health & Hospice Week

Your billing will be changing in a yearand- a-half thanks to the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA).

Watch for: MACRA requires the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to remove Social Security Numbers from all Medicare cards by April 2019, CMS says in a new message to providers. Instead, “a new randomly generated Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI) will replace the SSN-based Health Insurance Claim Number,” CMS explains on its website.

CMS won’t start sending out new Medicare cards with MBIs until April 2018 at the earliest, it notes. But it plans to use a transition period from that date through December 31, 2019. During the transition period, providers will be able to use HICNs but Medicare will return Remittance Advices with MBIs, CMS explains.

More information about the SSN Removal Initiative is online at www.cms.gov/Medicare/SSNRI/Providers/Providers.html.