This Monday Minute will take you through the key elements of the coming Notice of Admission and provide references.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Monday Minute today, you’ll actually be hearing this on Tuesday. I hope you had a great Labor Day holiday weekend. I want to share with you a document that was published by Palmetto GBA, CGS and NGS, all three of the Home Health Medicare MACs, this past week. This document goes through the details of what is going to be included in the Notice of Admission, beginning January 1, 2022. We’ve all known that this was going to happen, and they have put together a job aide to assist you in the process of documenting the Notice of Admission. One of the key things I wanted to point out was the bill type, the bill type will be a 32A for a Notice of Admission, or a 32D if you’re trying to cancel that Notice of Admission. Some of the other basic information that you would have had on the request for anticipated payment already. As we move through this document, those pages we’re rolling through just being the details of the actual content, which you obviously will want to know about. The big thing I want to make sure that everyone is clear about is listed here, on this page, it’s the last page of the document, where it goes through what’s going to happen when a patient is already on service in 2021 and transitions into 2022. As you can see, the example here with the start of care of December 13, 2021. The 30-day payment period being December 13 through January 11. The new 30-day period, assuming the patient is still on service, will begin on January 12. With that 30-day period beginning on January 12, there will have to be a Notice of Admission filed. In this case, the Notice of Admission will be considered an interim or temporary Notice of Admission, they technically call it in this document a one-time artificial admission date. So there will actually be a Notice of Admission using the start date of January 12, 2022. That will be considered an “artificial admission date”. So the key point here is that the Notice of Admission is going to be required for every 30-day period beginning January 1, 2022 or later, you only have to do it once as long as the patient remains on service. So, if it’s not a brand new start of care, but it’s a 30-day period, beginning January, 2022, where the start of care was in 2021, you will need to file a Notice of Admission for that. At the bottom of this document, it’s also giving you a link to other resources we will be giving you and the details of this Minute. The link to the document that I’ve just shared with you, as well as the link to the companion guide, that was already issued by CMS. That’s (companion guide) pretty much the instructions for your software vendors to put the elements into the EMR systems that will control the electronic submission.
I want to thank you all for participating today. Hopefully, this was information that will help you continue to prepare for the implementation of the Notice of Admission in January. Keeping in mind again, that even if the start of care is in 2021, you will have to have a Notice of Admission for the first 30-day period beginning in 2022. Thank you all hope you have an awesome week. Please stay tuned to your state and national home care associations and continue to support them. All the disasters that have occurred over the past few weeks, we have been praying for those areas; Waverly, Tennessee, the hurricanes, the wildfires, all of it continues to happen and we thank everyone for being on the front lines and taking care of patients even through this Public Health Emergency in addition to all of the disasters that have been occurring around us. Thank you all again and have a fabulous week.