Medicare Documentation: Practical Strategies for Justifying Therapy Services

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), a large percentage of Medicare claims are denied due to either a lack of medical necessity demonstrated in the documentation or failure to demonstrate through documentation that the skills of a licensed therapist are needed for the services rendered. However, patients and their loved ones know all too well how critical rehabilitation services are for older adults. Fear of denials can result intherapy services ending prematurely, which can cause setbacks, relapses, and hospital readmissions. It is important that Medicare beneficiaries receive the services that they need to prevent falls, ADL deficits, swallowing dysfunction,and cognitive decline. In fact, some studies suggest that rehabilitation therapy can add years the lifespan. Therefore, clinicians are charged with defending the services theyprovide and ensuring that the Medicare documentation demonstrates both skill, and medical necessity.

This workshop will take the guesswork out of Medicare documentation by providing strategies for therapists togenerate concise, skilled documentation without writing a novel that will satisfy Medicare intermediaries, and help other therapists to obtain a thumbnail sketch of the patient’s rehabilitation needs and prevent the need for a mini eval for each new treating clinician. Learn several quick assessmentsto help formulate objective data, as well as simple, yet effective strategies to construct treatment encounter notes and progress reports. Need to incorporate point of service documentation? No problem. This course will provide youwith the tools to tackle the least favorite part of the workday like a champ. And the workbook style case studies in the manual will allow you to practice the concepts taught for real life application.

Target Audience: Physical Therapists, Physical Therapist Assistants, Occupational Therapists, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Speech-Language Pathologists

Highlights

• Immediately improve your Medicare documentation with examples and a useful reference manual
• Review 20 - quick standardized tests and measures for OT, PT and SLP
• Interactive Q&A and case study to integrate material for your discipline