Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare training falls short.

A new educational article from National Government Services may help home health agencies a little bit with their face-to-face physician encounter burdens — but only a very little.

In a CERT Alert sent out last week, the MAC for HHAs as well as physicians tells docs that “While clinicians still need to certify benefit eligibility and a face-to-face encounter is still required, the need for extra documentation (e.g., the ‘narrative’) has been scaled back or eliminated” as of January 2015.

“The agency may need progress notes from you or hospital records of the face-to-face visit if it was done in the hospital setting in order to substantiate the reason home health care is needed,” NGS adds in the Alert.

The brief article doesn’t do much to explain the complexities of F2F documentation, experts lament.

For a link to the Alert, email editor Rebecca Johnson at rebeccaj@eliresearch.com with “NGS F2F CERT” in the subject line.