Home Health & Hospice Week

Don't forget that your OASIS assessments drive your cash flow.Boosting your case mix accuracy could add thousands of dollars in reimbursement to a single home health episode. But if your clinicians aren't determining case mix classifications correctly, your agency will lose out."With 153 possible combinations that generate case mix weights, it's easy to stray from total OASIS accuracy," says OASIS expert Pat Jump with Rice Lake, Wis.-based Acorn's End Training & Consulting. But this wandering can cost your agency dearly.Mistake: "When OASIS assessments are in-accurate or the clinician fails to accurately answer the OASIS data items, the provider 'donates' money back to CMS," Jump warns.Research shows that case mix inaccuracy tends to err in favor of Medicare and against the provider, Jump says. For example, clinicians tend to rate the client as more independent than they actually are. "When I conduct clinical chart audits, invariably I find that the OASIS [...]