Home Health & Hospice Week

Put the OASIS-D pedal to the metal right now.

Whether you’ve been painstakingly preparing for OASIS-D for months, or ignoring the major assessment-tool revamp due to so many other priorities on your plate, it’s time to kick your OASIS-D preparations into high gear.

Background: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a draft version of OASISD in March and the draft OASIS-D Guidance manual in July. OASIS-D contains major changes (see box, this page).

These changes are going to have a big impact on home health agencies, warns Diane Magrady, compliance lead with Morton Grove, Illinois-based Pragma-IT, creator of the therapy BOSS therapy documentation software solution. “Assessments are going to take longer to complete because each activity needs to be demonstrated to be evaluated and clinicians are still not familiar with the new questions,” Magrady predicts.

Expect it to “take clinicians filling out the OASIS at least a half hour longer to fill out a Start of Care assessment,” advises OASIS expert Sherri Parson with consulting firm Quality In Real Time in Floral Park, New York.

More fallout: “Staff filling out OASIS are going to have to really understand how to assess the items in the new GG and J questions,” Magrady tells Eli. “Clinical managers are going to need to be more available to provide extra support and guidance.”

Managers will also need extra time to review OASIS-D files in the first few months of implementation at least, as well as possibly perform shadow visits for staff.

Timeline: CMS is expected to issue the final OASIS-D document this month — perhaps in time for the agency’s big in-person training event Nov. 7 and 8 — but experts predict it will look virtually the same as the draft.

“It is still technically the draft version,” Parson tells Eli. “However CMS is not recommending waiting on training, but to move ahead with training now.”

Magrady reassures that “the draft version has a lot of information. I don’t anticipate that much will be changing in the final version.”

Parson urges, “it is not too late to get familiar with OASIS-D.”

HHAs still have time — if “they’re willing to really buckle down and get on it,” Magrady judges. Don’t delay. “There are two months before the end of the year” — including the hectic holidays — she stresses.