Latest HIPAA report highlights how practices let PHI fall through the cracks. If your lab is still using the same privacy protection protocols as it did when HIPAA was first enacted in 2003, you could be putting your practice in [...]
Provider numbers, spending, and profit margins have all fallen — again. Home health agencies’ average fee-for-service Medicare profit margin has fallen, but the misleading statistic is still giving congressional advisors ammunition for punitive pay cuts. In its Dec. 8 public [...]
The Senior Medicare Patrol’s recoveries are down, but it’s keeping up the pressure on the hospice industry. Hospices have been feeling scrutiny from regulators for some time, but now it’s coming from a new source — your patients’ peers. “In [...]
In 2020, the Senior Medicare Patrol fraud-fighting program netted about half its $16.8 million in recoveries from a home health investigation (see story, p. 190). For 2021, there’s no mention of home health in the SMP annual report at all, [...]
Plus: National chain buys 3-state operator. Another group of nonprofits have decided to form a coalition to reap administrative, financial, and other benefits. Background: Non-profit hospices in Ohio, California, and Oregon have formed affiliations to take advantage of economies of [...]
Will the high court’s decision be a present under the tree or a lump of coal in agencies’ stocking? Whether you favor or oppose Medicare’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement, knowing what’s happened so far — and what may occur next — [...]
Number of users, spending also are down, latest data shows. Law- and policymakers will base any legislative and policy decisions on facts and figures the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission provides in its annual report to Congress. MedPAC’s report issued March [...]
Is your Infection Control Plan from this decade? Home health agencies may feel overwhelmed by the volume of new and revised Conditions of Participation that Medicare will implement Jan. 13. But they can expect surveyors to zero in on these [...]
Expect a learning curve as survey results come in. Home health agencies have been working fast and furiously to get into compliance with the new Home Health Conditions of Participation that take effect in less than a month, but even [...]
Profit margin jumps 44% in single year. Indicators including the number of home health agencies, the number of visits, and the average number of episodes per user all fell in 2015, but the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission still thinks agencies [...]
