The changes to home care continue and all of us in healthcare are certainly accustomed to the alphabet soup of our industry. Here’s a new one: NOA, or Notice of Admission. If you’ve been in home care a while, you recall submitting RAPs or Requests for Anticipated Payment; these were down payments – if you will – or advances against the total claim for a home care certification period. In 2021 we saw the complete phasing out of the RAP and the requirement to submit a No-Pay RAP to alert CMS of a new certification period.
Effective January 1, 2022, CMS will now require a one-time Notice of Admission (NOA) which accomplishes the same goal: notification. To submit the NOA, you need a verbal or written physician order and you must have conducted the initial visit at the start of care. The NOA is valid for all contiguous 30-day periods of care, from admission to discharge, so the agency need only submit it one time. Once you discharge a patient to Medicare, agencies will need to send a new NOA before submitting additional claims for payment.
If the beneficiary is receiving home health services in 2021 and those services will continue into 2022, agencies will submit a one-time NOA using an “artificial admission” date. This date, listed under “from,” will be the date of the first period of continuing care in 2022.
As expected, CMS will apply a non-timely submission penalty for late NOAs if they’re not submitted within five calendar days of the start of care. Read the CMS bulletin for more useful information.