Home Health & Hospice Week

If you use a common trick to get your patients' correct HICN for billing, that option is going away. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services "is aware that some providers currently use a combination of the SSN and various suffixes until they find a HICN that matches their patient," CMS says in an email about the new Medicare cards that will go out to beneficiaries starting next month.

"The CMS will not allow for the return of an MBI in eligibility transactions if the SSN or the HICN is provided because there is a high risk of medical identity theft," CMS says. "Providers should ensure they have a registration/admission process in place that requests the Medicare identification card from their patients."

Reminder: The new cards will no longer contain Social Security Numbers, and instead will have the new Medicare Beneficiary Identifier number.