Home Health & Hospice Week

Improve your therapy documentation to guard against audits and comply with new rules. The PPS 2011 proposal to beef up your therapy documentation may place an extra burden on you and your therapists, but it should also help correct a big problem -- poor charting. While some therapists offer excellent documentation, many therapists in home care have let their clinical notes slide under the prospective payment system, experts say. The problem seems especially pervasive for contract therapists. "Almost across the board contract physical therapists have been slipshod with paperwork, templates, and overuse of assistants," says Lynn Olson of Astrid Medical Services in Corpus Christi, Texas. In the 2011 prospective payment system proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services "is addressing the issue and has taken a giant step towards fixing it," Olson cheers. New requirements: CMS has proposed a number of new therapy documentation requirements, including use of [...]