On the Friday afternoon before Easter weekend, CMS dropped a bombshell. In its proposed rule for fiscal year 2020, it lays out an update to the hospice reimbursement rates that would increase all non-routine levels of care significantly. In order to make the change budget-neutral, this means CMS would reduce the scheduled increase to Routine Home Care rates to keep them essentially flat from FY2019 to FY 2020. For hospices that currently provide little or no care at the non-routine levels, this is unadulterated bad news. However, for the average freestanding nonprofit hospice, CMS believes this will have a positive effect of an overall 4.2% increase in revenue. For hospices operating dedicated hospice facilities, I believe the impact may be far better than that.
Read MoreThere’s been so much ink spilled about the financial risks of hospice facilities (some of it written by me, I admit) that you too, might be surprised to learn how much activity there is in the U.S. around building, expanding and re-formulating hospice facility beds. But hospice beds continue to be a critically important part of the provision of quality hospice care. It's true that successfully planning a hospice facility is more complex than in years past. Whereas in the 1990s many hospice facilities opened to greater than expected demand and high occupancy rates, these days a provider must be very careful to calibrate the likely demand to the number of beds built and staffed.
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