Home Health & Hospice Week

If your patients fail to see the doc in the mandated timeframe, it means no money for you.   The feds have given home health agencies a bit more leeway on the physician face-to-face encounter requirement, but it’s still going to give you serious operational headaches. Based on a provision in the Patient Protec-tion and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is requiring physicians to have a face-to-face encounter with patients before certifying them for home care, or Medicare won’t pay for the patient’s claims. Proposed: Back in July, CMS proposed that the face-to-face encounter must occur 30 days before or two weeks after the start of care. Final: Now CMS has relaxed that timeline to 90 days before or 30 days after, as long as the visit is for the same reason the patient needs home care, according to the 2011 home health prospective [...]