On Wednesday, March 11 from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will host its second call to review and obtain feedback on the draft templates to assist home health agencies in documenting a beneficiary's eligibility for home health services.
Participants may access the call by dialing: 1-800-603-1774; Conference ID #: 78964233.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is considering developing a voluntary paper clinical template that could be completed by physicians during their face-to-face examination of a Medicare patient. Once a physician/practitioner has completed the template, the resulting document would become a progress note or clinic note that would be part of the medical record.
According to CMS, in fiscal year (FY) 2014, the Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) program found that more than half (51.4 percent) of the home health claims were paid improperly. Of the 1308 CERT-reviewed claim lines in error, approximately 90 percent were found to have insufficient documentation errors. The Majority of these errors were due to inadequate documentation supporting the face-to-face requirement.
In addition to developing a paper clinical template for documenting a home health face-to-face examination, CMS is developing an electronic clinical template. To see information about the electronic clinical template, see home health (HH) electronic clinical template.
The first draft of the paper clinical template is available for download on CMS' website.
Since the use of the template will be voluntary, how many physicians/practitioners do you think will use it?
