Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS proposes loosening up who can make the F2F visit for hospice patients. Your hospice face-to-face regulatory load should get a little lighter if a recent Medicare proposal is finalized. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposes "to remove the limitation that requires the hospice physician who performs the face-to-face encounter and attests to that encounter be the same physician who certifies the patient's terminal illness," the agency says in a release. The new regulations would read: "The attestation of the nurse practitioner or a non-certifying hospice physician shall state that the clinical findings of that visit were provided to the certifying physician for use in determining continued eligibility for hospice care," according to a proposed payment rule for 2012 slated for publication in the May 9 Federal Register. The change comes "as a result of stakeholder concerns," CMS says in the rule. Hospices have been "a nervous wreck" [...]