CMS estimates that between 2017 and 2021, Medicare Part A improperly paid $23.9 billion for inpatient hospital stays, with $7.8 billion attributable to short stays that did not qualify for Medicare Part A. On June 13, 2024,...more
Compliance Today (March 2021) - The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has provided the following compliance notice: “In a recent report, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) determined that Medicare made...more
Report on Medicare Compliance 29, no. 12 (March 30, 2020) A federal court on March 24 ordered CMS to let Medicare patients “challenge decisions by hospitals” to change their status from inpatients to observation, dating...more
Health plans and their delegated IPAs are using a number of different tactics to deny payment for inpatient services by improperly classifying inpatient claims as observation or other types of outpatient status. Payers are...more
On August 17, 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published its Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems final rule for Fiscal Year 2019 (Final Rule). The Final Rule contains a number of important...more
Effective for hospital inpatient admissions on or after October 1, 2018, CMS has removed the requirement that a signed physician order must be present in the medical record to establish inpatient coverage. While this guidance...more
Acute care hospitals that provide Medicare outpatient services to inpatients of other hospitals should be billing and collecting payment from the other inpatient hospitals and not from Medicare....more
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a further delay, through December 31, 2015, of the Recovery Auditors’ (RA) audits of the “Two-Midnight” Rule. Congress previously passed a law delaying...more
On July 1, 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the calendar year (CY) 2016 outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS)/ambulatory surgical center (ASC) payment system proposed rule that...more
On July 1, 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released proposed updates to the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) and Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) Payment System for Calendar Year...more
Under CMS’s modified inpatient admission guidelines adopted in the IPPS Final Rule, Part A payment is “generally inappropriate” unless the patient is admitted based on the physician’s expectation that the patient will require...more