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Home Health & Hospice Week

Face-To-Face:

PPS Rule To Ease F2F Burden, But Major Challenges Remain

Published on Tue Jul 26, 2011

Don't expect substantial changes to the face-toface requirement from CMS. One face-to-face hurdle may disappear come Jan. 1, but plenty of the other obstacles will still stand in home health agencies' way on the path to compliance. Old way: Currently, the physician who conducts the face-to-face encounter must be the same one who certifies the patient for home care eligibility. New way: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposes to allow hospitalist and other facility-based physicians to report their clinical findings from the F2F encounter to the certifying physician to fulfill the face-to-face requirement, according to the 2012 prospective payment system proposed rule published in the July 12 Federal Register. The change would mirror the way certain non-physician practitioners currently are allowed to report their F2F findings to the certifying doc. The change to this requirement is nice, notes Washington, D.C.-based health care attorney Elizabeth Hogue. "The proposed alternative [...]
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