Home Health & Hospice Week

The confusing and haphazard instructions for the new termination notices and home health advance beneficiary notices may be due in large part to their legal origins.

Congress required the expedited review process and termination notices in the Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000, and a federal appeals court decision in a beneficiary-initiated lawsuit (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XIII, No. 9) mandated the ABN changes.

CMS' hands may be tied on implementing the new forms, industry veterans acknowledge.

But blanketing beneficiaries with new notices they won't understand doesn't seem like a very good way to protect their rights, protests the Visiting Nurse Associations of America's Bob Wardwell, a former top Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official.

"Perhaps after everyone realizes that the only winners in the written notice approach are the paper merchants, we can sit down with CMS and work on procedures that better assure that patients' rights are protected," Wardwell tells Eli.