For Your Health:
Keeping the Pulse of the Law
There is good news for health care providers this holiday season with HHS’s recent announcement of numerous revisions liberalizing the AKS, Stark and CMP Laws. Among the helpful changes are modifications to the popular AKS personal services and management contracts safe harbor for part-time arrangements, and new AKS safe harbors and Stark exceptions for care coordination activities that could benefit post-acute care providers.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will use payroll-based journal (PBJ) data to identify nursing homes that have several days in a quarter without a registered nurse (RN) on site, or have a significant decline in staff on the weekends. The States will be required to inspect such facilities and cite any non-compliance resulting from such surveys.
CMS has released its finalized FY 2019 skilled nursing facility payment rule, to be effective 10/1/19. As anticipated, this will include the new Patient-Driven Payment Model (PDPM) replacing the Resource Utilization Group, Version IV (RUG-IV). The new rule is intended to simplify and reduce reporting costs and to result in a net increase of $820M in funding for SNFs.
The New York Times published an article this weekend focusing on staffing concerns by CMS at skilled nursing facilities, and highlighting one upstate New York facility in its story. The story asserted that staffing levels are inadequate, but more so asserted that staffing measures are often flawed and do not accurately reflect true staffing levels.
