Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS plans to reduce payments due to bundling of physician-provided therapy. The feds now have one more reason to ratchet down your Medicare reimbursement rates, thanks to a new OIG report. Background: When the home health prospective payment system began in 2000, all Part B therapy services furnished during a home health episode were bundled into the PPS payment, notes the HHS Office of Inspector General in a report released May 13. But after protests from physicians who wanted to bill therapy services during home health episodes, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a May 2003 transmittal stating "that therapy services are not subject to the home health consolidated billing requirement when performed by a physician," the report says. At the time, CMS didn't adjust the HH PPS payment rate "because CMS officials believed that the effort to determine the extent of physician-provided therapy included in the base [...]