Home Health & Hospice Week

More burdensome health care reform law provisions should soon come into sharper focus for home care providers.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should issue the 2011 proposed rule for the home health prospective payment system update very soon, CMS's Lori Anderson said in the July 7 Open Door Forum for home care providers. The rule will contain a number of provisions for HHAs drawn from the health care reform bill, including the requirement for the ordering physician to have a face-to-face encounter with the patient before certifications and recertifications.

Hospices too: The law's hospice face-toface requirement also will be included in the HHA rule, Anderson said. "We encourage the hospice industry to look to the home health proposed rule for the implementation plan for that ... hospice provision which requires a face-to-face encounter."

Other issues addressed in the forum include:

• OASIS changes. CMS has issued an "errata" sheet for the OASIS User's Manual, reported CMS's Robin Dowell. Ongoing, CMS plans to update the OASIS User's Manual annually and post errata sheets with changes every six months, Dowell said.

The new errata sheet contains changes to three OASIS C items, including correcting the skip instructions for M0100. (For a free PDF copy of the errata sheet, e-mail editor Rebecca Johnson at rebeccaj@eliresearch.com with "OASIS June Errata" in the subject line.)

Watch for: CMS plans to issue revisions to the Outcome-Based Quality Monitoring (OBQM) Manual soon, Dowell said.

• Overlapping episodes. CMS announced a new tool to use to check patients' home care status by checking to see whether a physician has billed for a cert or recert for the patient (see related story, this page). The tool is aimed at helping durable medical equipment suppliers avoid rejected claims, but HHAs also should be able to use this tool to help determine whether they have an overlapping episode with another agency.