Home Health & Hospice Week

Get ready for a whole new wave of patient data collection with OASIS-C. The new OASIS-C form will contain a lot of changes your clinicians will have to get used to, but the fact that many of them will be welcome ones could make the transition easier. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued its new OASIS-C form and is requesting comments by Jan. 13 (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XVII, No. 41, p. 322). After taking industry comments into account, CMS will issue a final form and instructions next year for January 2010 implementation, CMS officials indicate. By far, the biggest change in the newest incarnation of the form will be the additional process measures on a variety of topics, says Chi-cago-based regulatory consultant Rebecca Fried-man Zuber. The new process-based M0 items cover: • care provision timeliness (M0102 and M0104); • physician notification (M1038); • immunizations (M1040, M1045, M1050, and M1055); • risk assessments, care planning, and interventions for pain (M1242, M1244, and M1246), depression (M1730, M1732, M1734, and M1736), falls (M1930, M1940, and M1945), and pressure ulcers (M1300, M1302, M1304, and M1306); • interventions for diabetes (M1360 and M1365), heart failure (M1500 and M1510), and pressure ulcers (M1326 and M1328); • and drug reviews and teaching (M2000, M2002, M2004, M2010, and M2015). "There will certainly need to be considerable re-education for clinicians on the OASIS form and the individual questions," predicts Judy Adams, consultant with LarsonAllen based in Charlotte, N.C. (For tips on how to begin preparing for OASIS-C, see a future issue of Eli’s Home Care Week.) CMS Claims HHAs Will See No Added Burden The process measures will be a big change for clinicians, acknowledges Ann Rambusch with Rambusch3 Consulting in Round Rock, Texas. But after staffers get used to the revisions, Rambusch believes they will prefer the new form. "The new format makes more sense, and in the long run clinicians will like it," Rambusch tells Eli. How much more work? The amount of burden the new form, and particularly the new process measures, will place on your agency will depend on your current practices, Adams says. If you’re already performing screenings, conducting interventions for chronic conditions, and performing drug reviews and teaching, the new form will merely require you to record those items. But if you haven’t been taking all of those steps yet, you’ll have a lot of clinical processes to get into place before the new form hits about a year from now, experts warn. Using the existing OASIS instrument is a "small burden," CMS claims in supporting documentation for the new OASIS-C form. And using the new form won’t be any more work after training is completed, the agency contends. "Clinicians [...]