Home Health & Hospice Week

More relatively quick changes include changeover in personnel — the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary (currently Alex Azar) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator (currently Seema Verma), expects Washington, D.C.-based healthcare attorney Elizabeth Hogue. Their replacements are likely to bring new priorities.

Providers may also see timelines shift on certain initiatives that are underway, says Sherri Parson with consulting firm QIRT, which has been acquired by McBee.

For example: OASIS-E was bumped from Jan. 1, 2021 implementation to a start date “beginning with discharges and transfers on January 1st of the year that is at least 1 full calendar year after the end of the COVID-19 [Public Health Emergency],” CMS said in an Interim Final Rule published in the May 8 Federal Register this year. Now, “the timelines could be different,” Parson says.

But Parson expects “many of the initiatives … already in the works will still continue, since they are needed,” she says.

Longer term, “after the dust settles a bit on pandemic-related action,” Dombi says, home health and hospice agencies will get to see more about the Biden administration’s health care priorities. “We hope that the administration moves forward with its plan to support home care and family caregivers,” he says.

Reminder: This summer, Biden released a $775 million health care plan that included tax and Social Security credits for unpaid caregivers; raising reimbursement for home care aides; and putting $450 billion toward clearing the waitlists for Medicaid home and community-based services, then allowing states to drop their existing Medicaid HCBS waivers in favor of a new program with more federal funding (see HCW by AAPC, Vol. XXIX, No. 28).

Achievement of goals for the home care industry will be assisted by its bipartisan popularity, industry representatives maintain.

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organi­zation plans to keep pursuing its goals of “a new, well-defined community-based palliative care benefit, a more flexible hospice benefit, a more equitable and inclusive benefit, and improved tools to track and incentivize high quality care,” NHPCO CEO Edo Banach says in a release. “There is strong bipartisan support for these issues,” says NHPCO spokes­person Jon Radulovic.

“We as an industry and community have been very successful … in framing home care and hospice as absolutely bipartisan issues,” maintains Dean Chalios with the California Association for Health Services at Home. “With a new administration of one party, a Senate perhaps of the other party, and a House with a close partisan make-up, issues impacting our industry fall comfortably into that bipartisan space where they can be addressed without unnecessary rancor,” Chalios tells AAPC.

For example: Home health telehealth reimbursement legislation introduced in both the House and Senate illustrates that concept, Chalios says (see story, p. 330, for more on the legislation). “The bills introduced were sponsored by high profile legislators of both parties,” he notes.

Potential drawback: Democratic administrations are known for favoring more regulatory oversight rather than less. “The Biden administration may bring more regulations to the healthcare industry, including home care,” Hogue cautions. “Biden intends to reverse through Executive Orders a number of the current administration’s actions. So get ready, home care providers,” she advises.