Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare needs to get with the program and create procedure codes for hospices to bill telehealth visits. So say 17 hospice and telehealth-related organizations in a Sept. 12 letter to Congress.

Congress needs “to require [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] to develop and implement Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes or modifiers for telehealth visits and add them to the hospice claim form via any available legislative vehicle,” says the letter led by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

“Hospice providers need the opportunity to reflect the full scope of care provided to patients experiencing serious illness,” the letter urges. “Right now, care delivered through telehealth is not measured, and therefore, many visits are not noted in any official record. This means that patients’ records fail to reflect the full scope of care they receive, and hospice organizations are left without a way to fully capture the quantity of their patient visits and quality of their work,” the letter continues.

“Collecting accurate information is critical to drafting long-term policy, and effective guardrails, around the use of telehealth in the future,” NHPCO’s Logan Hoover says in a release about the letter. “Tracking telehealth visits and incorporating them into the hospice claim form is a simple, common-sense approach for appropriate telehealth policy,” Hoover says.