If you’d been hoping the penalty for late or no RAPs would go away for next year, no such luck. In 2021, home health agencies won’t receive any payment for RAPs, receiving 100 percent of the period’s payment from the final claim. But agencies that fail to submit RAPs or submit them later than five days after care starts will face a financial penalty, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services confirms in a new MLN Matters article on the topic released July 31. Reminder: No-pay RAPs will then go away in 2022, but be replaced with nearly the same thing. “The information needed for submission of the RAP in CY 2021 will mirror the one-time Notice of Admission (NOA) process, also finalized in the CY 2020 HH PPS final rule with comment period, starting in CY 2022,” CMS says in the article at www.cms.gov/files/document/MM11855.pdf.