HOME HEALTH LINE
June 15, 2009
Volume 34, Issue 23
New Web-based system offers hassle-free CPO payments
Physicians have a new incentive to claim CPO payments – and to refer to HHAs that help them.
It’s a software program that lets them review plans of care and any suggested amendments on a dedicated Web site while also keeping a running total of the minutes physician users spend on them.
Called firstCPO, the software is an easy solution to the Medicare requirement that practitioners seeking CPO reimbursement do 30 minutes per month of related oversight work to be eligible, says Bobby Robertson, CEO for HEALTHCAREfirst, the Ozark, Mo.-based company that developed the program.
The reaction from the first physicians that have been introduced to this has been “very enthusiastic,” says Teresa Henson, assistant administrator of Shepard’s Crook Nursing Agency, a 275-patient HHA in Pampa, Texas, one of the first users of firstCPO.
The program will mean even more local physicians seeking CPO payments, she predicts.
Interim HealthCare added a similar CPO tracking option last year to the Web-based information system it operates for some last 320 company and franchise-owner locations [HHL 3/23/09].
firstCPO to become available to all
HEALTHCAREfirst has made this program available without charge to either the physicians that
refer to the vendor’s approximately 400 HHA clients or to the client agencies themselves, Robertson says.
Starting this summer, however, the company expects to make the program available to all agencies. The charge for participating HHAs will be $2 to $3 per patient per month, though the service will continue to be free for doctors who use it, says CEO Robertson.
Recession triggers more CPO activity
Of the roughly 100 primary care practitioners referring to Shepard’s Crook Nursing Agency, some 75% already are filing for oversight dollars, or more than twice the percentage two years ago.
The increase largely reflects the loss of practice revenues precipitated by the recession, Henson
believes. Evidence of that is the physicians who hadn’t been submitting CPO claims but who recently have asked Shepard’s Crook for “15 months of paper” needed to support claims going back that far.
Henson hopes that firstCPO will help her agency avoid such requests in the future by making
communications with doctors more efficient. Advised by e-mail notices, practitioners will be able to review and sign off on care plans and other patient information within minutes of its posting on the HHA’s Web site, Henson notes.
Transmission of wound photos through firstCPO is
in the planning stage.
Physicians reluctant to embrace CPO
Responses to a recent HHL survey on care-plan oversight suggest agency marketers find slightly more than half the physician practices they call on unreceptive to seeking CPO payment.
Staff physicians at Archbold Medical Center in Thomasville, Ga., “were happy to jump on the CPO bandwagon” several years ago after Archbold’s home health unit, Archbold Health Services, began educating them about the reimbursement to be earned, says Carissa Hill, the agency’s community services coordinator. But in time the burden of the 30-minute requirement has reduced CPO filers to only “a handful” while nearly all continue to seek certification/recertification payments, which doesn’t have the same 30-minute requirement, Hill says.
One favorable sign in the survey responses is the
suggestion that Part B carriers are rejecting CPO
claims much less frequently than they once did.
– Burt Schorr [bschorr@decisionhealth.com]
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