Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Compliance:

Will Lax Home Health OASIS Submissions Earn Your Agency a 2 Percent Penalty?

New OIG report questions home health data collection and reporting practices. If you haven't been submitting an OASIS for every claim, prepare to come under fire. In 2009, 392,180 (6 percent) of Medicare home health agency claims did not have OASIS data for the same period, the HHS Office of Inspector General notes in a new report, "Limited Oversight of Home Health Agency OASIS Data." That represents a whopping $1 billion in HHA payments. Submitting OASIS data was a regulatory requirement at the time, but wasn't a condition of payment until Jan. 1, 2010, the OIG points out. In 2009, 85 percent of HHAs did not submit OASIS data for at least one claim, the report adds. And more than half of those HHAs did not submit OASIS data for at least 10 claims that year. Problems: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services penalizes HHAs with a 2 percent [...]
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