Home Health & Hospice Week

OASIS expert Judy Adams with Adams Home Care Consulting in Chapel Hill, N.C. offers seven rules for completing the OASIS that will guide your way to accurate reimbursement.

1. Complete each OASIS assessment independently without referring to any prior assessments.

2. Use the response N/A (not applicable) only when no other response is possible.

3. Concentrate on direct observation rather than interviewing. "Interviewing will get you some information, but it really won't get you accurate scoring in OASIS," Adams warns.

4. Know which questions require you to mark all the answers that apply, rather than selecting just one response.

5. Understand the assessment time frame. Unless the question directs otherwise, look at the 24 hours preceding the assessment and include the assessment visit itself, Adams says.

6. Recognize that "most of the time" means greater than 50 percent of the time. And when assessing multiple tasks within the same item (such as for activities of daily living items) see if the patient can do more than 50 percent of the tasks.

7. Pay attention to skip patterns to save time in completing the assessment. These patterns allow you to move quickly through the sections of the OASIS that do not apply to a particular patient. For example, if you answer M1340 -- Does the patient have a surgical wound? with 0 -- No, you can skip directly to M1350.