Home Health & Hospice Week

Clarifications to face-to-face questions contain good and bad news. Enforcement of the physician face-to-face encounter requirement for home health agency and hospice patients is nearly a month along, but agencies continue to wrestle with the mandate. The F2F rule continues to create a huge burden. "We are pulling staff from other tasks just to track the forms and to follow up with the physician offices," says JoAnne Ruden with the Visiting Nurse Association of Mercer County in Trenton, N.J. The VNA is seeing about 40 percent of F2F forms completed accurately, often after staff have followed up with physicians to secure valid forms, says Ruden, who spoke up about F2F problems to CMS at last month's March on Washington conference held by the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. About 20 percent of forms aren't coming back at all, Ruden adds. Heavy toll: "Physicians remain angry at the documentation [...]