Home Health Line
05/19/2014
Palmetto GBA has released a face-to-face audit checklist that provides more clues into what Medicare administrative contractors (MACs) might be seeking in agencies’ documentation. The MAC also posted a YouTube video April 18 walking agencies through how to use the checklist.
 
 
05/19/2014
Don’t reduce staff or cut their hours to make them part-timers this year solely to qualify for the one-year delay in the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) employer mandate.
05/19/2014
Take advantage of your vendors’ cost-analysis reports to spot potential areas for big supply savings.
 
 
05/19/2014
Home health coders are getting paid more than they did a year ago. Salaries are up about 4%, according to the results of the DecisionHealth’s 2014 home health coders’ salary survey.
 
 
05/19/2014
Get the national average salary for common home health titles in this bar graph below. This is part of DecisionHealth’s 2014 home health coders’ salary survey. 
05/19/2014
A coder’s level of education is directly tied to his/her salary, according to results from the 2014 coders’ salary survey. Consider that a coder with a master’s degree takes home an average annual salary of $71,539, while a coder with only a high school diploma makes an average of $40,673, according to survey results. 
05/12/2014
Medicares hospice payments, adjusted for inflation and other factors, would rise an estimated 1.3% under the proposed payment rule for fiscal 2015. But many of the approximately 3,900 hospices are going to face tighter scrutiny of their claimed care costs and drug expenses, the proposals suggest.
 
 
05/12/2014
The squeeze on home health agencies is getting worse as the number of Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees — now 30% of all beneficiaries — continues to surge. But some agencies have managed to thrive even though plans they contract with pay them less per episode of care than fee-for-service Medicare.
 
 
05/12/2014
Train coders to comply with etiology-manifestation coding convention, which prohibits the assignment of codes like 249.11 (Dementia in conditions classified elsewhere with behavioral disturbance) without first coding an underlying etiology such as Alzheimer’s disease (331.0), on your hospice claims. Failure to follow this rule will result in claims getting caught in an edit and returned for correction starting Oct. 1.
 
 
05/12/2014
Take a close look at your processes for communicating with hospice patient family members and providing timely care. Your ability to perform those measures will be publicly reported soon.
 
 

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