Nearly 20% of patients involved in a recent UT Southwestern Medical Center study were discharged from the hospital with one or more unstable vital signs, resulting in a higher number of deaths or readmissions than patients discharged with stable vital signs.
Q: I have a question about navigating the skilled nursing facility (SNF) benefit for Medicare. My understanding is that you can only use a Hospital-Issued Notices of Noncoverage (HINN) for inpatient, so you could use if less than a three-day stay. We have been giving Advance Beneficiary Notices (ABN) for our traditional Medicare patients that are observation when families are not timely on getting a SNF secured to those patients that require it. Is this correct?
Q: We provide tobacco cessation services and have been reporting these with time-based HCPCS codes. There are also CPT® codes for these services. Which is the appropriate set of codes to use for Medicare?
