As a result of a lawsuit, Bellevue Hosp. Ctr v. Leavitt, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ordered CMS to apply the occupational mix adjustment to 100% of the wage index effective for FY07. In a memorandum to Medicare fiscal intermediaries, the Center for Medicare Management stated the court’s orders to CMS to “immediately collect data that are sufficiently robust to permit full application of the occupational mix adjustment.” The court also requires that all “data collection and measurement and any other preparations necessary for full application should be complete by Sept. 30, 2006, at which time we instruct the agency to immediately apply the adjustment in full.”
CMS said it will collect new occupational mix data from hospitals and determine the occupational mix adjustment by Sept. 30, 2006, and it instructed fiscal intermediaries to “quickly notify hospitals to submit occupational mix data for the first three months of the six-month time frame previously announced for the 2006 survey.” CMS will also “modify the FY07 inpatient prospective payment system proposed rule and propose that the occupational mix adjustment be applied to 100%, rather than 10%, of the FY07 wage index.”
Hospitals will have until June 1, 2006, to submit to FIs the occupational mix data and to complete supporting documentation for the period Jan. 1, 2006, through March 31, 2006. After CMS publishes the interim survey data around June 29, 2006, hospitals will have until July 13, 2006, to submit requests to their FIs for corrections to their interim occupational mix data. Hospitals will have until Aug. 31, 2006, to submit to their FIs the occupational mix data and to complete supporting documentation for the period April 1, 2006, through June 30, 2006.
The proposed rule to revise the Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment system was published Tuesday in the Federal Register.
