Home Health ICD-9/ICD-10 Alert

Plus: Watch for OASIS-C-based reports and outcomes to go public this summer.

The list of OASIS-C items for which you need to report ICD-9 codes just got a little shorter.

Effective "immediately," the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has scrapped OASIS item M1012 (Inpatient Procedure) from the assessment in all but name, CMS's Robin Dowell said in the April 13 Open Door Forum for home care providers.

CMS is no longer using the item for payment, quality measurement, or risk adjustment. "It's not being utilizedby CMS at this point for any purpose," Dowell explained.

Therefore, "whatever response the home health agency selects for this item is insignificant," Dowell emphasized. You must enter responses at this point, but whether you choose to list a procedure or select "unknown" or "not applicable" doesn't matter. "Any response that the agency chooses is fine with CMS," she said.

Remember: Your agency's own policy and/ or private vendors may continue to require entry of the actual procedures, "but CMS no longer does," Dowell concluded.

You may be concerned about surgical procedures on the plan of care (POC), but recent changes alleviate this reporting burden. The instructions for completing the POC have been revised several times lately (the last time in March 2011) and no longer require you to list surgical procedure codes. "It will take some time before the software vendors catch up, but if clinicians have the option of selecting 'unknown' or 'not applicable' and don't care if the procedure codes are on the POC, then the increased burden of looking up procedure codes is relieved," says Lisa Selman-Holman, JD, BSN, RN, HCS-D, COS-C, consultant and principal of Selman-Holman & Associates and CoDR -- Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas.

Other OASIS items CMS addressed in the forum include:

Reporting. The first OASIS-C outcome reports in CASPER will be available in July rather than May as originally planned, Dowell revealed. The "slight delay" won't affect the Home Health Compare website displaying OASIS-C-based data for outcome and process measures in July, she said. Preview reports will be out in June. Submission transition. Prepare yourself for a change to the way you submit your OASIS data. CMS will transition from AT&T to Verizon as its CMSNet support for OASIS submission, Erik Thompson said in the forum.

CMS still doesn't have details about the transition quite yet, but will issue information when it becomes available, Thompson said.