Home Health & Hospice Week

Don't think the dollar amounts won't matter.

As you begin honing the cost-related numbers you'll soon report on your hospice claims, give this some careful thought: What will the powers that be do with your figures?

Here's what the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and its contractors are saying so far:

Hospice providers are to submit the charges on the claim as "covered charges," even though the figures will have no direct bearing at this point on what Medicare will pay for the services.

When processed, the fiscal intermediary will move the figures from the "total charges" column to the "noncovered charges" column, since reimbursement will still be based on level of care provided, not type of service, according to Cahaba GBA.

What they say: CMS has said repeatedly that it is asking for the additional data in the interest of defining the services that hospice patients receive.

What could happen: Ultimately though, the numbers could factor into reimbursement more directly, insiders say.

'It's clear from these responses that CMS intends these changes ... to contribute to changes in the hospice payment system, with an eye toward improving accountability in the Medicare Hospice Program," says a bulletin from the Visiting Nurse Associations of America.