Home Health & Hospice Week

Wheelchairs, pressure-reducing surfaces, and other 'usual suspects' also make the cost-cutting list. Durable medical equipment suppliers must fend off more Medicare reimbursement-reducing suggestions from the feds. The HHS Office of Inspector General's Compendium of Unimplemented Recommendations for 2010, formerly known as the Red Book and the Orange Book, is the OIG's annual list of rules it thinks government regulators should make stricter or enforce more vigorously to save money and reduce fraud. Oxygen suppliers have been working hard on Capitol Hill to secure a repeal of the 36-month cap. But the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should shorten oxygen equipment rental further to 13 months, this year's Compendium recommends. "If Medicare rental payments for oxygen concentrators were limited to 13 months, the program and its beneficiaries would save about $3.2 billion over a period of 5 years," the OIG claims. Other DME-related recommendations in the Compendium include: • Ensuring [...]