A comprehensive new report provides nine hospital recidivism success stories about inter-agency collaboration projects in nine different regions. We found two that include home health care agencies using advanced technology as their projects’ center pins. This week, a home care agency, hospital and senior clinic in Denver worked together to reduce 30-day readmissions from 20% […]
To know how your business is doing, you must know not only what your bottom line is but how much better it could be. How much total business is in your marketplace and are you getting the same percentage of it today as in the past? You know all about your slice of the pie […]
“Information Technology is not the end game, it is a means to the end.” In an exclusive HCTR interview accompanying the publication of an important new article, former home care CIO Fran Lorion summed up his “Lesson Number One,” acquired during an IT career that started at IBM and ended with 12 years at
On August 19, 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an interim final rule entitled “Breach Notification for Unsecured Protected Health Information.” This rule describes how healthcare providers must notify patients when the security of their protected health information has been breached. Providers must comply with these new requirements beginning on September […]
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposal to place a 2.5% cap on Home Health PPS outlier payments in CY2010 will produce meaningful healthcare savings without negatively impacting patient access to care. Such is the determination announced this week by Healthcare Market Resources (HMR), a research company that provides customized local market analysis […]
Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) are expected to turn their attention to home health care providers sometime next year, looking for reasons to recoup PPS episode payments received as far back as October, 2007. If, as is anticipated once they get started, they use the same reasons Regional Home Health Intermediaries (RHHI), Qualified Independent Contractors (QIC) […]
Medicare has published results of payment denials and reconsiderations for CY2007. Home care does fairly well, according to this report, except that fewer than 2%
Connolly Healthcare, the RAC for Region C, is again leading the RAC pack in getting CMS approval for issues to review. This week Connolly posted two issues for DME providers. Click here if you are interested in seeing the description of these issues. Diversified Collection Services, the RAC for Region A, continues to be the only RAC […]
There is still not too much activity at the RAC Forum and there may not be until RACs begin targeting hospices. Nevertheless, we have added a new topic/category to the RAC Forum that we hope will be helpful. It is called “Claim Denial Reasons.” At the moment we do not know what issues the RACs will […]
The RACs have not yet begun targeting hospices and may not until 2010. Why should hospices worry about them? No one knows at this point how intense the RAC scrutiny of hospices will be. Could all this RAC concern be a case of much ado about nothing?
Maybe, but probably not. Let’s look at some of the things we know and some of the concerns:
