Home Health & Hospice Week

Physician staff can prepare the face-to-face documentation, CMS says in new Q&A. With the April 1 deadline for the physician face-to-face encounter nearly here, home care providers are getting desperate to get into compliance with the burdensome regulation. Now some information has come from the feds that may help agencies in that effort. Physicians can merely sign off on the F2F documentation their "support staff" prepares for them, says a new question-and-answer posted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on its website. "A physician's own support staff can help the physician draft the face-to-face encounter documentation narrative in a number of ways," CMS says in the Q&A. The agency lists examples of how that might work. "The support staff can extract the narrative from the physician's own medical record documentation of the encounter," CMS says in Q&A #10482. Or "the support staff can generate the narrative from the [...]