Hello, everyone and welcome to our Monday Minute. Today I want to touch on a very important element of the Notice of Admission that begins January 1, 2022. We have discussed the fact that the Notice of Admission will be completed only at the start of care once we get fully into 2022. However, for the periods that cross over from 2021 to 2022, they will have to be tied to a Notice of Admission, even though the start of care date may have been in 2021. For example, if you have a patient that you admit December 10, the first 30-day period that begins December 10, 2021 will have a No Pay RAP filed with a five day timely filing limit. If you then have a subsequent 30-day payment period that begins in January from that start of care, which would be the second 30-day period, and it will begin approximately January 11. With that January 11, 30-day period you will have to have a Notice of Admission. No, it is not a start of care, but it does have to be filed within five days of the first day of that 30-day period and that Notice of Admission, you will have to use an artificial start date. The artificial start date or admission date will be the first day of that 30-day period. If in my example, the 30 day period begins on January 11, your artificial admission date will be January 11.
Now some of you are thinking she’s told us this before why are we talking about this again? Well first of all, we’ve only talked about before it hasn’t been implemented yet. Most importantly, I’m here today to help you face the reality that many of the software EMR Systems that you are producing your billing in and will be producing Notice of Admissions in, is not going to deal with these crossover periods. In other words, EMR Systems like WellSky. WellSky has already admitted and told all their clients that they are not going to be producing the crossover Notice of Admission and that agencies will have to key them directly into the DDE System, the Direct data Entry System.
The content of this Minute today we are going to give you a link to the CGS Medicare website where they have provided a job aide that gives you step by step on how to key these Notice of Admissions directly into the Direct Data Entry System. One key element here is making sure that someone on your staff has an active DDE login so that they can key those Notice of Admissions directly into the DDE System. I cannot confirm for sure which software systems are going to be ready and which are not. The only one I can confirm is not going to do the crossover 30-day periods is WellSky. They have already been putting alerts into the system so that you, their clients would be aware.
We hope that this helps initiate the urgency of ensuring that you have someone within your organization that has direct access to the DDE System with an active login, so that even if your EMR System does handle these transitional NOAs, there still could be the period of time that you have an NOA that is going to be late, and you need to key it into the system to prohibit that. We hope that you will get on top of that and make sure that you are prepared for that January 1 implementation.
Thank you again for joining us today. We hope you have a fantastic week, and we hope that you are looking forward to the coming holiday where you hopefully will be able to celebrate very handily with friends and family. We also never want to go without encouraging you to support your state and national home care and hospice associations and thanking the people that are working on the frontlines during this continuing pandemic.