Hospice Interdisciplinary Group (Hospice IDG)
Hospice care is patient- and family-centered, where the patient's and family's preferences and needs drive the care plan. The hospice interdisciplinary group (also referred to as Hospice IDG or IDG), also referred to as the interdisciplinary team (IDT) is a team of...
Pay Transparency: What Managers Need to Know
As a manager in hospice care, your role goes beyond overseeing patient care and managing staff. It includes ensuring that your team feels valued and fairly compensated. Pay transparency is becoming a hot topic, and understanding its implications can help you...
Elevate Your Hiring with Powerful Demographic Insights
Creating and using benchmarks to compare your company's hiring demographics against those used by government agencies like the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is crucial. Benchmarking helps ensure that your company’s hiring practices are fair and...
What is the Hospice Special Focus Program?
The hospice Special Focus Program (SFP) is conducted by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The objective of this program is to identify poor performing hospice agencies, based upon quality indicators, that place hospice beneficiaries at risk. These...
Hospice Length of stay – active or discharged patients?
Patient length of stay is monitored to detect instances of inappropriate use of the hospice benefit or other deficiencies in the services delivered by the hospice provider. Length of stay is monitored for both very short length of stay as well as for length of stay...
Average length of stay versus median length of stay
Patients are eligible for hospice if they have a terminal diagnosis and a prognosis of six or fewer months to live if their disease runs its natural course. A patient who lives longer than six months can still get hospice care if the medical director or other hospice...
Using data to support a hospice marketing strategy
Why is data valuable? Like all other business decisions, a hospice marketing plan must be data driven. More progressive hospice agencies have increasingly begun to understand the value of many types of data in supporting business decisions. This includes internal...
What is the hospice governing body?
What is the governing body? In accordance with the Conditions of Participation, a Medicare certified hospice agency must have a governing body. The governing body has ultimate responsibility for the hospice agency, including legal and financial authority. Medicare...
What is a UPIC audit?
What is a UPIC? Unified Program Integrity Contractors (UPICs) are contracted by CMS to conduct detailed medical review, data analysis, and audits of healthcare providers to investigate possibilities of Medicare or Medicaid fraud, waste, and abuse. While the primary...
What is the TPE audit process?
What is a TPE? A Targeted Probe and Educate (TPE) is an audit program that was rolled out by CMS in 2017. The stated goal of this program is to help providers reduce claim denials and appeals. The TPE works to achieve its goal by educating providers in topics that...