Tag Archives: SNF Services

April 27, 2012

Mastering Medicare Online Registration

Online Registration

San Francisco, CA: July 27th Online Ticketing for Mastering Medicare: A Practical Guide To Succeeding Under RUG IV powered by Eventbrite Soldotna, AK: August 24th 2012 Online event registration for Mastering Medicare: A Practical Guide To Succeeding Under RUG IV powered by Eventbrite

March 10, 2012

CMS Dropped a Bombshell at the MDS Conference

News

I returned from the CMS conference in St Louis with my head spinning as did most of the other conference attendees that I spoke with there. John Kane dropped the bombshell which took everyone some time to absorb. He focused on the changes occurring April 1st with the announcement of defined policies which he later said had always been in place but were now being emphasized. So what are these changes? Well they relate to combining scheduled and unscheduled assessments, consequences of early and late unscheduled assessments and inactivating assessments. …
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January 20, 2012

Our Seminars For 2012

News

We have changed how we will be presenting our live seminars for 2012 by scheduling both our SNF and Outpatient Part B seminars over the same weekend. This will help in keeping our registration price down for these presentations. We will be presenting Mastering Medicare: A Practical Guide To Succeeding Under RUG IV on a Friday; the Anatomy of Documentation, which was the second day of last year’s Mastering Medicare, will be scheduled on the Saturday with Tests, Measures & Questionnaires following on Sunday. This change in format will allow …
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January 13, 2012

What constitutes a Medicare Week in SNF?

Medicare Mentor

Question: What constitutes a SNF Medicare week? I keep getting asked if there is a “Medicare week” for therapy. Some people have said if a patient comes in on Tuesday, and the frequency is 5 x a week I can treat them Tuesday through Friday then start the “Medicare week” and see them any 5 times Sunday through Saturday. I thought that if they come in on Tuesday, I need to see them five times between each Tuesday and the following Monday. What is the right way? Sunday to Monday …
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October 27, 2011

Under SNF Part A, how do I bill unattended and attended modalities

Medicare Mentor

Question: In regards to billing for attended and unattended Modalities under Med A in SNF. Under the new regulations effective October 1, 2011, do we continue to bill attended and unattended modalities as non time sensitive services? Answer: Supervised modalities such as e-stim have skilled and non-skilled components as far as Part A is concerned. The time spent in determining the appropriate placement of the electrodes, application of the electrodes and determining of the appropriate intensity is skilled. Once the intensity of application is achieved, the time spent receiving the …
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October 8, 2011

Can I treat patient’s with supervised modalities and have all time billable?

Medicare Mentor

Question: A modality vendor stopped in to our clinic recently and said that for Part B a therapist can apply an unattended modality (unattended EMS or diathermy) to more than one patient at the same time and all time is billable. Is this correct? Also could you run through different part B scenarios such as: 1. Therapist supervision 2 part B unattended modalities at the same time and not seeing any other patient. 2. Therapist supervising 2 part B modalities and doing manual therapy with third part B patient. Answer: …
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September 30, 2011

Quick reminder of New Rules for SNF

News

The new 2012 regulations for SNF are almost here so this is just a quick reminder of changes. 1) The COT OMRA requirement starts the day after the first PPS assessment after Oct 1st NOT WITH October 1st 2) Group therapy minutes are divided by 4 by the software grouper 3) An EOT is required when the patient misses 3 consecutive days without any therapy for any reason 4) This can be changed to an EOT-R when patient resumes care at the same level within 5 consecutive days since the …
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September 5, 2011

Do The New SNF Rules Allow Us To Get The Patient Better Than Their Prior Level?

Medicare Mentor

Question:I was informed that we can treat beyond what was there prior lever of function, I work in skilled rehab, and they said this was part of the new rules. If the patient would benefit from going beyond PLOC. Is this true? Answer: Absolutely NO. There has been no changes in the regulations on that topic AND once the patient does not require the 5 day a week intensity of the SNF Part A they need to be discharged to a lower cost provider such as HHA or Part B. …
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September 4, 2011

CMS publishes the updates to the RAI Manual

News

This week CMS published the updates to the Minimum Data Set (MDS) 3.0 Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) manual for skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). These updates will be effective October 1st, 2012. The manual contains both the updated version files (new for 2012) and earlier version (no change) files. Change-table files are included only for sections of the manual that have changes that will be effective October 1. Sections that have been updated include: Title Page, Table of Contents, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 (Introduction, Sections: C, H, I, K, …
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August 7, 2011

How Do I Count Student Minutes Under The New SNF Regulations?

Medicare Mentor

Question: Under the SNF final rule how is the following situation handled? A therapist is supervising a student (not in line of site) while the therapist is seeing another patient. How are the Part A SNF minutes applied? Do both the therapist’s patients and student’s patients minutes count as 1:1 or because the student is an extension of the therapist, are the minutes counted as concurrent. I’ve read the final rule document and am still confused. What if we have the same scenario above except that the therapists and students …
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