Home Health & Hospice Week

You are on the hook to provide free care if your hospice patients' face-to-face requirement isn't met, CMS says in a new MLN Matters article. When the F2F is missed, the patient is no longer eligible for the Medicare hospice benefit, CMS explains in MLN Matters article MM7478. "Where the only reason the patient ceases to be eligible for the Medicare hospice benefit is the hospice's failure to meet the face-to-face requirement, we would expect the hospice to continue to care for the patient at its own expense until the required encounter occurs, enabling the hospice to re-establish Medicare eligibility," CMS says in the article. The article is online at http://www.cms.gov/MLN_MattersArticles/Downloads/MM7478.pdf.