Home Health & Hospice Week

Aide training costs agency big. Making sure employees' certification is up to snuff could be one of the most important compliance measures your home health agency takes.
 
Case in point: To resolve charges that its home health aides were not sufficiently trained, Philadelphia-based Nursing Home Care Management Inc., doing business as Prestige Home Care Agency, agreed to a $1.5 million settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services, Patrick L. Meehan, U.S. Attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania, says in a release. Prestige also agreed to a five-year corporate integrity agreement.
 
Medicare requires home health aides to have successfully completed a minimum of 75 hours of classroom and supervised practical training. The instruction and training should address observation, reporting and documentation of patient status, basic infection-control procedures, knowledge of emergency procedures and reading and recording temperature, pulse and respiration, Meehan notes.
 
Prestige submitted claims for services rendered by aides who lacked any training or whose training was inadequate and incomplete, prosecutors said. "The provider knowingly sent unqualified and ineligible workers into patients' homes to provide vital healthcare services," Meehan charges.
 
"This is a serious violation of patient trust," Meehan says. "A homebound patient has no choice but to accept on faith that the individual helping care for them is qualified."
 
As part of the settlement, Prestige denied the government's allegations.   Acute or not acute? Home health coders in a quandary over whether to use revenue-enhancing acute stroke diagnosis codes versus late effect stroke codes have finally gotten some guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. HIPAA requires providers to follow ICD-9 coding guidelines, which mandate late effect CVA coding in the post
acute setting.
 
But CMS continues to direct HHAs to use the acute stroke codes (now in the 434 series) to secure their rightful payment benefits, a CMS official told Josephine Sienkiewicz of the Home Care Association of New Jersey in a Nov. 15 written clarification. For more information on this and other coding issues, see the December issue of Eli's ICD-9 Coding Alert at www.elihealthcare.com.   Your hospice could be overlooking an untapped market - the African-American population. In a recent survey commissioned by VITAS Innovative Hospice Care, "we found that the African-American community indicated they knew the least about hospice initially, and when informed about hospice by the surveyor, they were also least likely to want to use hospice services if given the opportunity," notes VITAS spokesperson Mark Cohen in a release. "Less than 10 percent of hospice services nationwide are provided to African-American patients. We need to do more to reach out to them."
 
Other findings from the survey of 400 adults conducted by Bendixen & Associates: 83 percent of respondents would prefer to be cared for [...]