Home Health & Hospice Week

If your state hasn't adopted a Medicaid face-toface requirement yet, it will soon. Just when you're getting used to the Medicare face-to-face rule, you'll need to adjust to one on the Medicaid side -- and it won't be easy. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposes a Medicaid physician face-to-face encounter rule that looks nearly identical to the one for Medicare, according to a proposed rule published in the July 12 Federal Register. Under the rule, which doesn't contain an implementation date, physicians would need to conduct an F2F encounter 90 days before or 30 days after the start of home care services and provide documentation stating that the encounter occurred and explaining why the clinical findings from it support home care eligibility. The rule aims to "align the timeframes with similar regulatory requirements for Medicare home health services," CMS notes in the rule. Like the Medicare requirement, the Medicaid [...]