Home Health & Hospice Week

You might want to track the new 10 percent outlier cap yourself. If you were relying on Medicare to help you know where you stand on the 10 percent outlier cap, it might be time to change your plans. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has a Fiscal Intermediary Shared System option to help home health agencies track their total and outlier payments, explains regional home health intermediary Cahaba GBA on its Web site. But the problem is that "the new 'Home Health Payment Totals Inquiry' screen, (FISS Option 67) does not display correct information to allow providers to track outlier payment and HH PPS payment totals," Cahaba says. "Payment totals will display, but the data disappears at the first of each month." The result: HHAs can't track their own payments "to ensure that outlier payments comprise no more than 10 percent of the HHA's total HH PPS payments [...]