OASIS Alert

As part of its effort to de-fang OASIS, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has proposed to cut the following items from the OASIS instrument for all time points, according to information recently posted on its Web site:

M0160 (financial factors),
M0310 (structural barriers),
M0320 (safety hazards),
M0330 (sanitation hazards), and
M0600 (patient behaviors).

Another part of the revamp is to relocate patient demographic information to a "patient tracking sheet," instead of including that information on the OASIS assessment. "These items will be collected and submitted at the start of care assessment and only up-dated when the appropriate response to an item changes. This tracking sheet will be part of the patients clinical record," CMS says. The items included in this change are:

M0010 (Medicare provider number),
M0012 (Medicaid provider number),
M0014 (branch state),
M0016 (branch ID number),
M0020 (patient ID),
M0030 (SOC date),
M0032 (ROC date),
M0040 (patient name),
M0050 (patient state of residence),
M0060 (patient ZIP code),
M0063 (Medicare number),
M0064 (Social Security number),
M0065 (Medicaid number),
M0066 (birth date),
M0069 (gender),
M0072 (referring physician ID),
M0140 (race), and
M0150 (current payment source).