Home Health & Hospice Week

A cost report rejection may result in payment suspension while you fix the errors, warns HHH MAC Palmetto GBA. Palmetto rejects about 10 percent of all home care and hospice cost report filings, the MAC notes on its website.

“Providers that have their cost reports rejected that were received on or after the due date also have the unfortunate circumstance of having their payments suspended immediately,” the MAC says. “Payments cannot be restored until a corrected cost report has been re-filed. The payment restoration process may take 3 to 5 business days after receipt of a re-filed cost report.”

Tip: File your cost report early to take advantage of Medicare’s grace period, Palmetto suggests. “The grace period is ... equal to the number of days the cost report was received before the due date,” the MAC says. “The earlier the cost report is received the longer a provider has to resolve any rejection issues before its payments are suspended.”

Red flag: Unless you use Worksheet D, Part II to claim costs for reimbursable services like vaccines, “the settlement summary on Worksheet S should be $0 for both Part A and Part B,” Palmetto instructs. “Small dollar amounts indicate rounding errors when reporting payments from the PS&R report. Larger amounts indicate that the PPS Pay-ment amounts reported on Worksheet D, Part II likely contain posting errors or missing PPS Payment amounts.”

Advice: “We recommend a review of the PPS payments posted on Worksheet D in these instances,” Palmetto says.

More cost report submission tips are in the MAC’s May Medicare Advisory at www.palmettogba.com/medicare — choose “J11 MAC – Home Health and Hospice” in the left column, click on “Publications” in the left column, then choose “Medicare Advi-sory” and click on the May issue.