Home Health & Hospice Week

Will you or won’t you have to comply?

While many home health and hospice agencies are scrambling to get into compliance with new deadlines for staff COVID-19 vaccinations, they are also keeping tabs on the Jan. 7 proceedings at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Reminder: Last month, a federal appeals court lifted the stay on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ COVID-19 vaccination mandate, and CMS issued new due dates that will hit on Jan. 27 (initial shots) and Feb. 28 (second shots) (see HCW, Vol. XXXI, No. 1). Both home health and legal experts advise that agencies ready themselves for compliance immediately.

SCOTUS will also hear arguments regarding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Emergency Temporary Standards (ETS) vaccination mandate for companies with more than 100 employees. That mandate was reinstated last month as well, and has upcoming due dates of Jan. 10 and Feb. 9.

But those due dates may easily get scuttled by the results of the SCOTUS proceedings.

Many providers are hoping for just such a postponement. For example, in Tennessee, Ballad Health CEO Alan Levine has sent a letter to CMS highlighting the staffing crisis that would follow enforcement of the vaccination mandate.

“If the proposed IFR is finalized without changes, CMS’s vaccine mandate threatens to exacerbate the national shortage of healthcare workers, particularly in rural communities,” Levine tells CMS in the letter. The Johnson City-based health system will lose 15 percent of its workforce, Levine estimates.