Home Health & Hospice Week

Stand by for a question-and-answer document.

You should write OASIS-C1 training in ink on your fall calendar. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has confirmed that it will offer education on the new OASIS-C1/ICD-9 tool on Sept. 3, according to the agency’s website.

Background: CMS bumped the OASIS-C1 implementation date from Oct. 1, 2014 to Jan. 1, 2015, after the ICD-10 diagnosis coding set was delayed to October 2015. The hybrid OASIS tool will include all the C1 changes except five items addressing diagnosis codes (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIII, No. 19).

In the upcoming webinar, CMS says it will go over the new OASIS-C1/ICD-9 data set and its implementation; types of changes made to the data set; OASIS-C1/ICD-9 Guidance Manual changes, and an OASIS questions-and-answers update.

Home health agencies won’t be the only ones listening. “We encourage all interested State and Regional Office Staff to participate in the webinar as it relates to the accuracy of OASIS data collection and enforcement of the Home Health Agency (HHA) Conditions of Participation (CoPs),” CMS says in its notice of the webinar.

You can submit questions for CMS, but don’t expect answers right away. “We want to make sure all questions are researched prior to answering,” CMS says. “Following the webinar, we will post a Q&A document addressing questions previously submitted.” CMS will also post an archived copy of the webinar about a month after it takes place.

Do this: The webinar is limited to 1,000 lines, so call in early to secure your spot. CMS recommends calling in a half hour before the 90-minute webinar starts at 2 p.m. ET.

Information on dialing in, submitting questions, and more is in the notice at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Provider-Enrollment-and-Certification/SurveyCertificationGenInfo/Downloads/Survey-and-Cert-Letter-14-40.pdf.