By Tamala Sammons, Senior Therapy Resource
In an effort to ensure our clinical practice and policies match regulatory requirements, we frequently review therapy policies and POSTettes. Recently, we identified a number of areas where we could make changes to help reduce the administrative burden of our therapists.
Effective Aug. 1, 2019, the following changes were put into practice:
- Because the IDT determines the reason for skilled admission, the need for a Medical ICD-10 code on therapy documents was removed for Part A Payers. Clinicians can now add a treatment ICD-10 code in both sections of the POC and UPOC. No changes were made to Part B documentation, because therapy determines the Medical ICD-10 in most cases.
- With clinical measures shifting to section GG for functional outcomes, we removed the need for therapists to also have to complete CARE Item sets data.
- We removed the requirement for Part A payer clarification orders when the POC/UPOC documents are signed by MDs using Clinisign. Optima’s Clinisign product ensures timeliness of MD participation with therapy POCs/UPOCs. Clarification orders for Part A payers are still required for documents that are not signed by MDs through Clinisign.
- We identified that IDT discussion around Part A payers should be different than Part B payers. We removed the requirement for a Med B UDA and updated the IDT policies to allow the IDT process of Part A and Part B payers to be different.
- We also updated triple check forms to match these changes where applicable.
Our goal is to continue to ensure our policies and practices are designed to support clinical treatment and care of our patients and only require the administrative activities that are supported by a state or federal requirement. We hope these changes help the teams to be able to provide more hands-on care.