Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
MedPAC Meets
Last week the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met in Washington, D.C. to discuss a number of Medicare payment issues. MedPAC’s proposed Medicare 2021 payment recommendations dominated the December agenda, including: hospital inpatient and outpatient payments ambulatory surgical center payments physician and health professional payments hospice payments home health care payments inpatient rehabilitation facility payments long-term care hospital payments In addition, MedPAC discussed Medicare’s policy for transfers between post-acute-care facilities and hospice and received a staff update on the Medicare Advantage program. MedPAC is an independent congressional agency that advises Congress [...]
Coronavirus Update for Tuesday, December 8
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal government as 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 8. Provider Relief Fund HHS announced that the Provider Relief Fund will distribute $523 million in second-round performance payments to 9248 nursing homes as rewards for successfully reducing COVID-19-related infections and deaths between September and October. HHS concluded that between September and October, 69 percent of 13,251 eligible nursing homes met the incentive program's infection control criteria. See HHS’s announcement of the nursing home distribution and a list of how much of this [...]
Coronavirus Update for Friday, December 4
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal governments as of 2:45 p.m. on Friday, December 4. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS has updated its FAQs on Medicare fee-for-service billing with 14 new questions that address administration and billing for monoclonal antibody therapy. The new questions can be found on pages 33-34, p. 34, pp. 120-121, p. 121, pp. 121-124, pp. 124-125, p. 125 (four questions), p. 126, pp. 126-127, p. 127, and pp. 127-128. CMS covers much the same ground in an updated version of [...]
Coronavirus Update for Wednesday, December 2
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal government as of 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday, December 2. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS has announced the introduction of two new Medicare condition codes that will take effect for claims received on or after February 1, 2021: one to enable providers to report when a service is provided as part of Expanded Access approval and another to enable providers to report when the service is provided as part of an Emergency Use Authorization. Find an article about the [...]
Coronavirus Update for Monday, November 30
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal government as of 2:30 p.m. on Monday, November 30. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS has expanded its March program “Hospitals Without Walls,” which provided broad regulatory flexibility that permitted hospitals to provide services in locations beyond their existing walls, by establishing a new “Acute Hospital Care At Home program” that expands those regulatory flexibilities so hospitals may treat eligible patients in their homes. The CMS news release announcing the program expansion explains that the agency believes that … [...]