Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS clarifies what to do when the face-to-face requirement isn't fulfilled. Complying with the hospice face-to-face physician encounter requirement will get a little easier under new rules taking effect Oct. 1, but tripping up on your F2F documentation will get easier too. "We are finalizing the policy to allow any hospice physician to perform the face-to-face encounter regardless of whether that same physician recertifies the patient's terminal illness and composes the recertification narrative," the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in the 2012 wage index final rule published in the Aug. 4 Federal Register. Hospices that use this policy must remember to take the next step beyond the encounter. New regulatory language will "state that the attestation of the nurse practitioner or a non-certifying hospice physician shall state that the clinical findings of that encounter were provided to the certifying physician, for use in determining continued eligibility for hospice," [...]