Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Watchdog agency wants hospice pay in nursing homes to go down.

Home health and hospice agencies may feel like they are seeing ghosts when they look at the OIG’s latest report.

Last month, the HHS Office of Inspector General issued its annual Top Unimplemented Recommendations report, including some humdingers that providers would rather never see again.

For example: Although it doesn’t make it into the OIG’s Top 25, the report nevertheless urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to “implement the home health agency surety bond requirement.” The OIG reaches back to reports from 2012 and 2017 for that recommendation.

Home health items that do make it into the Top 25 for the first time include implementing a financial proration penalty for early discharges form inpatient rehabilitation facility stays to home health, and requiring Medicare Advantage plans to monitor and submit ordering providers’ National Provider Identifier numbers for home health and other services.

The OIG’s No. 1 unimplemented recommendation this year urges CMS to “take actions to ensure that incidents of potential abuse or neglect of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, including those in … hospice care … are identified and reported.” Recs ensuring that hospices pay for drugs and durable medical equipment that are supposed to be bundled into the hospice per diem payment also make it into the Top 25.

The OIG also once again mentions its idea to reduce hospice payments for patients in the nursing home setting.

The 69-page report is at https://oig.hhs.gov/reports-and-publications/compendium/files/compendium2022.pdf.