WITHIN FIVE MINUTES, your admitting clinician makes critical decisions that have far-reaching effects on your agency’s care delivery under Medicare.

Too often, clinical compliance and financial difficulties experienced later in the episode stem from initial-visit admission decisions. Protect your outcomes and episode payments with this series of audio conferences, designed to teach you and your staff best practices in establishing new patients. In just one hour each month, you’ll learn how to manage admission visits and important homecare situations with powerful insights and strategies from Beacon Health.

Register now and learn:

• Techniques to ensure appropriate Medicare admissions
• Tips to streamline the admission visit
• Ways to demonstrate compliance with initial visit and assessment requirements
• How the first visit is key to the best patient outcomes and episode payment

Session 1: Beginning the Initial Assessment Process
Audio Recording Available

• Properly manage referrals and start-of-care orders
• Understand the difference between initial visit and initial assessment
• Receive valuable tips to streamline and ease the admission process
• Learn how to bill for a visit on the day of hospital discharge
• Get the facts and resolve concerns about the initial visit


Session 2: Verifying Patient Eligibility
Audio Recording Available

• Learn how to determine within the first five minutes whether or not the patient is homebound
• Explore the four components of homebound status
• Gain insight into part-time or intermittent services
• Identify the qualifying discipline
• Know how to fit occupational therapy, home health aide, and medical social service into the mix

Session 3: Establishing the Qualifying Service
Thursday, November 20, 2008; 1-2 PM Central Daylight Time

• Know how to utilize skilled nursing services - observation and assessment, teaching, skilled procedures, etc.
• Recognize the concerns about management and evaluation being the qualifying service
• Take a closer look at therapy as the qualifying service
• Avoid denials for single visits, non-billable visits, and more

Session 4: Mastering the Plan of Care
Thursday, December 18, 2008; 1:00 - 2:00 P.M. Central Daylight Time

• Learn what happened to the CMS-485
• Understand the role of agency policy in completing the plan
• Develop strategies to complete the plan of care and show that services are reasonable, necessary, and skilled
• Identify locators of concern
• Master the plan-of-care scan - verify that the patient qualifies, determine that the services are appropriate, and avoid denials

Earn 1.0 contact hours for each nurse participant per session by returning a completed evaluation with a $5.00 per person processing fee - (CLICK HERE) for additional information.

The Presenter: Diane J. Omdahl, RN, MS