Home Health Line Breaking News
01/14/2015
None of the Labor Department’s companionship regulation is valid, according to the latest ruling by a federal judge on a suit challenging the regulation’s requirement for overtime payments to unskilled home support workers.
 
 
01/13/2015
The home health industry won’t have to worry about immediate scrutiny from recovery audit contractors (RACs). A week after CMS announced the one national contractor it chose to perform all RAC reviews for home health, hospice and durable medical equipment (DME), a different RAC has filed a protest.
 
01/09/2015
CMS is reporting that its Assessment Submission and Processing (ASAP) system for agencies to submit OASIS data starting Jan. 1, 2015, is experiencing a problem with the Branch ID.
 
 
01/08/2015
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Jan. 6 issued an order denying Medicare’s effort to have the National Association for Home Care & Hospice’s (NAHC) lawsuit about the face-to-face requirement dismissed.
 
 
12/31/2014
Connolly LLC will serve as the national recovery audit contractor (RAC) for home health, hospice and durable medical equipment (DME) claim reviews, CMS announced Dec. 30. The announcement marks the official RAC re-start of home health claims reviews.
 
 
12/31/2014
In a second ruling on the Labor Department’s companionship regulation, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., stayed Labor’s new definition of companionship services as limited to “fellowship” services, with no more than 20% of the home support worker’s time spent on personal care or housekeeping tasks.
 
 
12/23/2014
Home health agencies and their vendors that are using an XML format as they switch to the OASIS Assessment Submission and Processing (ASAP) system will need to upload a new grouper from CMS’ website. CMS uploaded the new grouper to its website Dec. 22.
 
12/23/2014
In a partial victory for private duty agencies, a federal judge has ruled that the Labor Department misinterpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) with its companionship regulation, which effectively requires providers of companionship and live-in domestic services to pay overtime when their employees work more than 40 hours a week.
 
12/23/2014
The U.S. Congress has agreed that CMS, within its 2016 budget request, should “quantify and explain how the policy directing physicians to conduct face-to-face certifications for home health care has prevented fraud, increased access to health care and impacted costs to the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
 
 
12/16/2014
CMS has provided doctors with several examples to use within their documentation to justify a patient’s homebound status and need for skilled care.
 
 

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