Wayne Allard: “Medicare home health providers are in a paperwork crisis. Current regulations of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid…”

“Medicare home health providers are in a paperwork crisis. Current regulations of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, requires that caregivers administer voluminous paperwork to patients when they administer care. These paperwork requirements are too excessive for both patients and caregivers. Caregivers must administer numerous forms including data collection, patient privacy information, a plan of care, advance directives, a visit schedule, a comprehensive assessment, and more. One of these requirements, called OASIS, or the Outcome and Assessment Information Set, is 94 questions long and takes a few hours to fill out. Before a nurse or physical therapist administers care, she and the patient must sit down and answer questions and fill out this paperwork. Colorado providers have told me they spend more time filling out paperwork than they do caring for patients. As a result of this excessive data collection and dissemination, home health caregivers are leaving the home health industry. Two weeks ago a home health administrator in Colorado Springs came to share with me the situation in her agency. On her plane trip here, three of her newly- home health physical therapists called to tell her they were leaving the agency because of excessive paperwork requirements. They said they were going to leave the home health industry and return to the hospital industry. We cannot afford this.…”