Hello everyone, and welcome to our Monday Minute. It has been an interesting start to 2022 already, weather wise and COVID wise. It’s been a bit crazy across the country, I think, but definitely in my neck of the woods. In addition to that all the regulatory changes that have taken place already and the problems that have come along with that have been a bit frustrating.
The Medicare Home Health Notice of Admission has been what some would call a nightmare. All three of the Medicare MACs have had some level of issue with the processing correctly of those. In some cases, maybe have processed the NOA, but some of the claims are being held in suspense because the pricer is not yet adjusted.
So, the one thing I want to say is, don’t panic but do understand that there are problems throughout the system specifically for sure in Palmetto GBA and NGS. I would tell you to go follow their claims processing error logs, but for the most part, those have not been updated yet. Do know that there are issues with getting those accepted, but don’t just lay back and assume that it’s going to be taken care of.
You need to make sure that you’re following up, check on any listservs that you might be a part of for communication that someone else may have received that would apply to you, and make sure that you are continuing to check with your EMR Systems and your Medicare MACs. We will get through this, but it is going to be a process. As we feared, some of the EMR Systems were ready for the Notice of Admission, some of them were not, some of them said they were, but they were not. That has been frustrating as well. Do understand that you can key those directly into the DDE system, if you are struggling to get them electronically filed. Also know that if you are keying them directly into the DDE system, you do not need to put any information on page two. In fact, you won’t even have access to page two in order to do that.
We wanted to give you this brief update, but pretty much just to let you know that there are issues abounding and it might be a very slow process. Because of the fact that this is a claims processing system issue and not an agency issue, you will have to be granted exception to any NOAs that are considered late as a result of the failure of the CMS and Medicare’s Claims Processing Systems. You want to be diligent in keeping up with exactly what transpired and the timing of that. Do not hold your Notice of Admissions and not send them. You have to send them so that when they do get the system corrected, they will see that you had already sent them in a timely manner, they just could not be processed once they got there. You don’t want to hold them because if you do that, they will be considered late once you get them there. I hope that this has helped, I wish that I could give you more, but that’s pretty much all we have at this point. We will continuing to stay on top of this, of course, for our clients and for us to be able to help around the country.
Please stay tuned again to your state and national Home Care and Hospice Association listservs & websites, paying attention to education that might be rolling out. There are some EMR systems that have put out helpful tools and videos to the process of the NOA and their systems and are doing webinars, some on a daily basis, to try to get their clients through this.
Thank you again, and we hope to be with you again soon and please stay warm.