What Home Health Providers Need to Know About OASIS-E

Home Health Care News 
By Joyce Famakinwa | February 1, 2022
 
With OASIS-E set for Jan. 1 of 2023, home health providers need to begin preparing now, if they haven’t already.
 
After delays related to the public health emergency, OASIS-E is finally being implemented next year in order to line up with the start of the nationwide expansion of the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Model.
 
For providers, payment and outcomes are directly impacted by OASIS data collection. It’s important that the data accurately reflects the status of the patient.
 
The OASIS-E update is arguably one of the biggest industry changes in recent years, J’non Griffin, principal of the coding and OASIS department at SimiTree Healthcare Consulting, told Home Health Care News. 
 
“It will have a lot of new aspects, like social determinants of health,” she said. “It will have some increased behavioral assessments … that the skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are already providing. It will also help facilitate one of the value-based purchasing items, which is the transfer of health information between post-acute providers, among other things.”
 
Expanded questions on pain and infusion are some of the other OASIS-E changes.
 
“Of course, it will be a learning process, especially in the beginning,” Griffin said. “Just doing things like the mental health assessment will take some education on the clinician’s part because usually, they don’t do those.”
 
For now, only a draft version of OASIS-E is available. But providers should expect the finalized version by the end of the first quarter of 2022. 

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