Home Health & Hospice Week

The Civil Money Penalties that home health agencies are now subject to can pack a serious punch, a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services letter to State Survey Agency Directors shows. And a recent inflation update makes the punch that much harder.

Background: When the newly revamped Home Health Conditions of Participation were set to take effect in January 2018, CMS declined to push the implementation date, despite industry protest. But the agency did agree to suspend CMPs for the first year the CoPs were in effect (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXVI, No. 43).

Now that the one-year anniversary of the implementation date passed on Jan. 13, 2019, the CMPs are back in effect, notes the National Association for Home Care & Hospice in its member newsletter. That means surveyors can apply the penalties when they find agencies out of compliance.

CMS updated the CMP amounts in a final rule last October, raising the maximum home health penalty to $20,521 from the 2017 amount of $20,111, CMS notes in the survey letter.

Remember: That’s a huge jump from the previous $10,000 maximum. In September 2016, the Department of Health & Human Services issued an interim final rule adjusting CMP amounts for inflation. The rule changed the “maximum daily penalty amount for each day a home health agency is not in compliance with statutory requirements” to a whopping $19,787, nearly double its prior $10,000 amount, HHS specified in the rule published in the Sept. 6, 2016 Federal Register.

The survey letter, which lists the range of CMP amount levels for varying violations, is at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Provider-Enrollment-and-Certification/SurveyCertificationGenInfo/Downloads/QSO19-04-NH-HHA-CLIA.pdf.