Home Health & Hospice Week

Don’t duplicate face-to-face efforts unnecessarily. Some eleventh-hour guidance from Medicare may ease your face-to-face encounter burden, at least somewhat. In two new questions-and-answers, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indicates that physicians won’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to each piece of documentation a patient requires -- including the face-to-face encounter narrative, the home health plan of care, and the hospital discharge summary. Because the F2F information is also “often present on the discharge summary and/or physician orders for home health services, the face to face encounter documentation narrative may satisfy multiple purposes,” CMS says in Q&A #10482. “A physician’s orders for home health services or an acute/postacute discharge summary can be used to satisfy the face-to-face documentation narrative, if they reflect the clinical condition of the patient as seen during the encounter, they are drafted by the physician or the physician’s support personnel, and they meet [...]