Home Health & Hospice Week

Documentation will stay complicated for the troublesome face-to-face requirement. You can expect a few tweaks to the face-toface rule to make your life easier come Jan. 1 -- but not much easier. In the 2012 home health prospective payment system final rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services makes a change to who may conduct the face-to-face physician encounter requiredby law. Now: Currently, if the attending physician in the hospital conducts the F2F encounter, she also must perform the documentation of the encounterand certify the patient for home care. In January: In the new year, any hospital doc (not just the attending) who performs the F2F can inform another certifying physician of his findings instead. Then the certifying physician can complete the F2F documentation. That mirrors what non-physician practitioners already can do under F2F regs. Catch: The provision applies only to patients discharged to home care from a hospital or [...]