Home Health & Hospice Week

New guidance from Medicare sheds light on thorny face to face encounter issues. Your Medicare Advantage patients may be an administrative pain in many ways, but they do have one redeeming feature from a regulatory standpoint -- no face to face encounter requirement. The FFE is not required for patients in Medicare Advantage plans, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a set of frequently asked questions on its website. "The face-to-face provision applies only to Medicare fee for service," CMS says in FAQ 10300. "I think that the Medicare Advantage plans are exempt from this requirement because they are not required to pay by the episode," notes Chicago-based regulatory consultant Rebecca Friedman Zuber. "Many of them authorize visits in small numbers, so the financial impact is not as great." And one of the aims of the FFE requirement is to control skyrocketing home care utilization. Managed care organizations [...]