Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS defends its face-to-face documentation requirements for physicians. Face-to-face documentation may be out of your hands, but you'll still be penalized for problems with it. That's the message representatives from the home care industry gave the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's March on Washington conference March 26. After expending lots of effort and resources, the Visiting Nurse Association of Mercer County in Trenton, N.J. has reached almost 100 percent compliance with the F2F physician encounter occurring, the VNA's Joanne Ruden told CMS reps in an agency panel at the conference. But the compliance rate is much lower for sufficient documentation, she reported. The VNA has seen an 11 percent decrease in referrals due to the problem, Ruden believes. "Phy-sicians are angry" about the extra documentation requirements, Ruden said. "You guys really don't get it," Chicago-based regulatory consultant Rebecca Friedman Zuber [...]