Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare ups the retention period to 7 years.The feds may have given you a motivating factor to help physicians maintain and submit documentation for home care patients, but it could increase your medical record workload as well.Medicare's Conditions of Participation (CoPs) for home health agencies require providers to retain records for five years, notes the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. But a new transmittal from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ups that retention period to seven years for "written and electronic documents ... relating to written orders and certifications and requests for payments for ... home health services" and other items and services including DME, CMS says in Transmittal No. 431 (CR 7890).CMS will hold ordering physicians to the same seven-year standard for record retention, it says in the transmittal. And CMS now requires the doc "to provide access to that documentation pursuant to a CMS [...]