Home Health & Hospice Week

Tip: Renumbering indicates major changes to an OASIS item.

If you treat renumbered OASIS-C1 items the same as their old counterparts under OASIS-C, you could be making a big mistake.

For the revamped OASIS tool that takes effect Jan. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medi-caid Services is giving new numbers to items with substantial changes to the question or response options. Be on the lookout for:

• M1033: Risk for Hospitalization which was previously M1032. The responses for M1033 are objective and no longer require professional judgment, said physical therapist Linda Krulish of Redmond, Wash.-based OASIS Answers during the Sept. 3 CMS OASIS-C1 implementation webinar.

The Item Intent has also been updated to underscore this change from subjective to objective responses. The Item Intent for M1032 was “Identifies patient characteristics that may indicate the patient is at risk for hospitalization in the care provider’s professional judgment.”

The Item Intent for M1033 is simply “Identifies patient characteristics that may indicate the patient is at risk for hospitalization.”

• M2102: Types of Assistance Needed and Sources/Availability which was M2100. Watch for better wording on the column titles, says Beth Johnson with Johnson, Richards, & Associates in Brighton, Mich. Especially of interest is new phrasing that indicates the response excludes assistance from home health agency personnel. Also note the addition of “home exercise program” to response M2100-D. “This is not a Guidance change but simply a change requested by users for clarity,” she says.

The biggest and best change to M2102 is the combination of two columns so that clinicians will no longer have to decide between whether access to assistance is unclear or unlikely — a very confusing area on the OASIS-C, says attorney Lisa Selman-Holman with Selman-Holman & Associates and CoDR — Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas.

• Vaccination items make the jump to M1041-M1056 from M1040-M1055. The wording on these items becomes much clearer as CMS reorganizes the questions and responses to de-emphasize where the patient received the vaccine. 

Note: Listen to CMS’s OASIS-C1/ICD-9 implementation webinar at  https://webinar.cms.hhs.gov/oasisc1-archive..