Home Health & Hospice Week

Don’t sweat it if your Hospice Item Set submissions haven’t been perfect. Late HIS submissions shouldn’t affect your payment rate — for now, says the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Ser-vices in new HIS questions-and-answers released last month.

Question: “What if we complete or submit an HIS record late? Will this affect our APU determination?” one agency asks in the Q&A set.

Answer: CMS “realizes there is a learning period and that hospices will run into unexpected difficulties or timeliness issues with completion and submission of HIS records, especially during the first months of implementation,” the agency responds. “If a hospice realizes that it will not meet the timeliness criteria for any given record, it should still complete and submit that record, even if that means the completion/submission will be ‘late’ for the record.”

Late completion and submission of HIS records results in a non-fatal (warning) error message, CMS points out. “Records containing nonfatal errors can still be accepted by the QIES ASAP system.”

However: “Hospices should make every ef-fort to correct any collection and submission difficulties they are experiencing in an effort to comply with HQRP requirements,” CMS says in the new four-question set at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Hospice-Quality-Reporting/Hospice-Item-Set-HIS.html — scroll down to the “Downloads” section and click on the October Q&A link.