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Home Health & Hospice Week

Prospective Payment System:

New Regs Likely To Intensify HHA Therapist Shortage

Published on Tue Jul 06, 2010

Get started on improving your therapy documentation right now. If your therapists have gotten sloppy with their documentation, they're not alone -- but now's  the time to rectify it. Requiring more detailed documentation of therapists as proposed in the prospective payment system proposed rule (see related story, p. 218) is a good idea in general, says physical therapist Cindy Krafft with consulting firm Fazzi Associates. For the most part, the new requirements "are things we should have been doing already," she says. Thanks in part to computer-generated documentation templates on point of care software, therapists "have let the computer just speak for us," says physical therapist Sparkle Sparks, a consultant with OASIS Answers. The result can be generic documentation that makes it hard for auditors to figure out what's going on with the patient, let alone if visits are reasonable and necessary. Staff shortages have led many HHAs to let poor [...]
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