Home Health & Hospice Week

States offer differing views on OASIS suspension. 

Home health agencies eager both to discard their OASIS private-pay duties and toe the regulatory line are still in a dilemma.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Tom Scully announced in a Nov. 5 Open Door Forum in no uncertain terms that home health agencies are no longer required to collect OASIS data for patients covered by payers other than Medicare and Medicaid.

Scully ordered forum listeners to "assume you are not required to collect [OASIS data for private-pay patients] as of today" (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XII, No. 40, p. 314).

But with a month going by with no official notice, states are offering different views on whether the requirement actually has been lifted. For example, Idaho is telling its home health agencies to sit tight until official notification is made available.

"At this point, nothing will change from the perspective of Idaho Medicaid until we receive official notification," says Idaho Medicaid spokesperson Ross Mason. "Comments given at a conference don't provide a green light. We will wait until we have official notification before passing along any advice to home health agencies."

And Louisiana is warning HHAs to hold off on making changes as well. "Please remember that we still have no regulatory language for the suspension of OASIS data collection on non-Medicare non-Medicaid patients," Louisiana OASIS Education Coordinator Cecile Castello has told the HomeCare Association of Louisiana. "Thus the regulations will continue to be enforced as presently written," Castello said to HCLA.

On the other hand, Hawaii is telling agencies to go full steam ahead with their discontinuation of OASIS data collection for the affected patients. "HHAs do not have to wait for any official written notice from CMS to change their OASIS collection practices," says Gerald Chung, Medicare Certification Officer for Hawaii's Office of Health Care Assurance. "It became effective November 5, 2003."

Nervous agencies will likely have their questions answered when President Bush signs the newly passed Medicare bill into law, expects Bob Wardwell with the Visiting Nurse Associations of America. Among many home care provisions (see story, "Legislation"), the bill contains a section suspending OASIS data collection for private-pay patients until the Department of Health and Human Services evaluates its usefulness. After HHS issues a report on the matter, the collection will either resume or cease once and for all.