Home Health & Hospice Week

Reach out to variety of sources for education. The new face-to-face encounter requirement is overwhelming home health agencies, but you can use these strategies to get a handle on the mandate before its April 1 enforcement date arrives: 1. Target physicians for education. Getting the word out to physicians has proven a major challenge for HHAs trying to implement FFE requirements (see related story, p. 58). “A major difficulty … is the participation of the physician community,” says Harvey Zuckerberg with the Michigan Home Health Association. If you haven’t already, you can start your education campaign with a letter to physicians explaining the new requirement. Resource: FFE letters for physicians and other referral sources that you can adapt are furnished for free by the National Association for Home Care & Hospice at www.nahc.org/regulatory/home.html (scroll down to “PPS Face-to-Face Encounter Model Letters and Tools”) and the Home Care Association of [...]