Home Health & Hospice Week

Agencies will have little control over new physician-related payment condition. Home health agencies are hoping for some big changes to one troublesome provision in the 2011 proposed payment rule -- the face-to-face physician encounter requirement. The mandate for the face-to-face encounter was in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health care reform law enacted earlier this year. But the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' version of the requirement is even stricter than the law requires. For example: PPACA leaves the timeframe for the face-to-face encounter requirement open, but suggests six months. CMS instead wants the timeframe to be 30 days before or two weeks after the start of care in order to increase physician accountability, it says in the proposed rule published in the July 23 Federal Register. The proposed rule also requires that the encounter be for the primary reason home care services are required and that [...]