Home Health & Hospice Week

If the industry fails to get more specific, Medicare will start requiring line-item billing. This spring, hospices will have yet another piece of data to include on their Medicare claims. As of Jan. 1, hospices have had to report visits or phone calls for nearly all hospice days billed, the Centers  for Medicare  & Medicaid Services notes in Jan. 29 Transmittal No. 1897 (CR 6791). The problem: "When a hospice patient has different levels of care within a given month, it is sometimes not clear from the claim which visits or calls are associated with each level of care reported on the claim," CMS explains in the transmittal. "This is because each level of care is only required to be reported once on the claim for the location it was provided and all days associated with that level of care are billed on one claim line, even when the days being [...]