Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
HHS Webinar Thursday
The Department of Health and Human Services will hold a webinar on Thursday, October 22 at 1:00 (eastern) about the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ recent guidance explaining how it will implement an interim final rule that makes the collection and reporting of COVID-19 data a condition of participation in Medicare for hospitals. On August 24 CMS published an interim final rule establishing new requirements in the hospital conditions of participation in Medicare and on October 6 HHS published the updated document “COVID-19 Guidance for Hospital Reporting and FAQs [...]
Coronavirus Update for Tuesday, October 20
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal government as of 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 20. Provider Relief Fund HHS has updated its Provider Relief Fund FAQ with a new question that appears on page 46 and is marked “Added 10/15/2020.” The new question is “An organization has prescription sales as part of its revenue. Can these sales be captured in the data submitted as a part of revenue from patient care?” The answer is “Generally no, prescriptions sale revenue may not be captured as part of [...]
Coronvirus Update for Tuesday, October 20
The following is the latest COVID-19 information from the federal government as of 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 20. Provider Relief Fund HHS has updated its Provider Relief Fund FAQ with a new question that appears on page 46 and is marked “Added 10/15/2020.” The new question is “An organization has prescription sales as part of its revenue. Can these sales be captured in the data submitted as a part of revenue from patient care?” The answer is “Generally no, prescriptions sale revenue may not be captured as part of [...]
States Expect Medicaid Enrollment, Spending to Rise in FY 2021
States expect to see their Medicaid enrollment and spending rise in FY 2021, driven by increases in unemployment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and maintenance-of-effort requirements in legislation enacted earlier this year. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey of state Medicaid directors found that those officials expect their Medicaid enrollment to rise 8.2 percent in FY 2021 and their Medicaid spending to increase 8.4 percent that same year. Most states expect the 6.2 percentage point increase in federal Medicaid matching funds that was included in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, [...]
Feds Penalizing Wrong Hospitals for Readmissions, Study Finds
Medicare’s hospital readmissions reduction program often penalizes the wrong hospitals for excessive readmissions. Or so concludes a new study published in the journal JAMA Cardiology. According to the study, …the percentage of hospitals that were incorrectly penalized was 10.1% for acute myocardial infarction, 10.9% for heart failure, and 12.3 percent for pneumonia. The study also found that the readmissions reduction program is failing to penalize some hospitals that do deserve penalties based on the program’s standards, writing that …in fiscal year 2019, the percentage of hospitals that should have been [...]