Home Health & Hospice Week

Suppliers reach both ends of error spectrum, CERT report shows.

Home health agencies and hospices are billing Medicare pretty accurately, according to the most recent findings of CMS' Comprehensive Error Rate Testing.

HHAs had a 1.4 percent error rate and hospices a 1.0 percent error rate in the November CERT report, which covers claims from April 2006 to March 2007.

Durable medical equipment suppliers had a wide range of error rates broken out by supplier type. The lowest was 0.6 percent for a medical supply company with prosthetic/orthotic personnel certified by an accrediting organization. The highest was a whopping 51 percent for "unknown supplier/provider."

Overall, the national error rate for Medicare was 3.9 percent, CMS says in the report. That translates to $10.8 billion in improper payments, $1 billion of which was underpayments, the report says.

That figure is down from 4.4 percent last year.

The report is online at www.cms.hhs.gov/CERT --click on "CERT Reports" in the left-hand column and choose the "Improper Medicare FFS Payments" link and then "FY 2007 Long Report."

• In all the PPS revisions hullabaloo, don't forget about another big change advancing with the new year--the CARE tool. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will have providers testing the post-acute Continuity Assessment Record and Eval-uation (CARE) assessment tool in a demonstration project starting in January.

The tool, which CMS intends all post-acute care providers to fill out eventually, is meant to examine the costs and outcomes for similar diagnoses across different post-acute care settings (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVI, No. 27).

CMS is already gearing up for the tool to become standard for all HHAs, noted the agency's Pat Sevast at a recent OASIS Certificate and Competency Board annual meeting in Baltimore.

Example: In the proposed changes to the OASIS tool that just wrapped up its second comment period, CMS revised the wording of some of the OASIS items to be closer to the proposed CARE tool items, Sevast told attendees.

• CMS has rounded up its technical corrections to the PPS refinements final rule in a Nov. 30 Federal Register notice. The agency made official changes to charts, calculations, code descriptors, wage index values and more. See the notice at www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fedreg/a071130c.html --scroll down to the CMS entries.

• You soon may be tapped to give your two cents about your Medicare contractor. CMS will send its third annual Medicare Contractor Provider Satisfac-tion Survey (MCPSS) to a new sample of Medicare providers this month, it says in a release.

The agency is distributing the 15-minute survey to about 35,000 randomly selected providers of all types, it says. CMS will use the survey "as an additional measure to evaluate performance," the release notes. "In fact, all Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) will be required to achieve performance targets on the MCPSS as part of their contract requirements by 2009."

• You can download CMS' OASIS Follow-up Assessment Scheduling Calendar for 2008 at www.qtso.com/download/hha/oasiscal2008.pdf.

And don't forget about the changes for OASIS assessment dates in the five-day window at the end of the year, regional home health intermediary Cahaba GBA says in a message to providers (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVI, No. 39).

Consult these web sites for help in navigating the tricky time period, Cahaba suggests: www.cms.hhs.gov/OASIS/Downloads/OASISConsiderationsforPPS.pdf and www.cms.hhs.gov/HomeHealthPPS/Downloads/TransitionEpisodesQA.pdf.

• Check out this new Web site designed to disseminate good ideas in home health care.

The site, The Health Care Innovations Ex-change, is a project of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The goal is to help "health care professionals share and adopt innovations that improve health care quality," according to a release announcing the new site. For more information, go to www.innovations.ahrq.gov.

• Your therapists and clinicians may be interested in a new study that shows seniors with memory impairment can still benefit from cognitive training. Such training could allow mildly impaired older adults "to maintain skills that allow them to carry out daily tasks and lead a higher quality of  life," according to the National Institutes of Health-funded study published in this month's Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

Study subjects that couldn't improve memorization could still improve reasoning and processing skills, found the study conducted by an Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis researcher.

"Research such as this is critical to discovering ways to help older individuals stay independent and take charge of their own lives and health for many years to come," says NIH's Patricia A. Grady in a release.

More information is at www.nih.gov/news/pr/nov2007/ninr-30.htm.

• Regional chain LHC Group Inc. is continuing its hospital relationship strategy with an acquisition in West Virginia.

LHC will partner with St. Mary's Medical Center Inc. in Huntington to operate St. Mary's Medical Center Home Health Services.

Lafayette, LA-based LHC has acquired a controlling interest in the agency, which has revenues of $1.9 million annually and serves five counties. This brings LHC's total service area in West Virginia to 30 counties, the company says in a release.