Welcome 2019! If you have performed or reviewed any OASIS assessments since the beginning of the year, you may have been taken aback by the number of changes in the dataset. While its true that more than twice as many questions have been removed than have been added, the questions added have multiple parts and are quite different from the traditional OASIS C questions.

After being immersed in OASIS-D for a couple of weeks, I decided to rest my weary mind today and look at a chart created for a patient who broke her hip. She was admitted to the hospital where she had an ORIF followed by a rehab and then SNF stay. Guess what I found? All the OASIS questions that are new to Home Health Care. This proves to illustrate the ultimate goal of standardization across post acute care providers described in the IMPACT Act. Very simple math will let payor sources know which providers are making patients better. And of course, they already know how much providers are paid. This could be a true advantage to home health. If we can achieve results that are equal to or better than other providers, Medicare will favor home health as providers because we cost less.

The good news is that therapists should be easy to train. In fact, CMS invites a multidisciplinary approach to the OASIS-D assessment and therapists might be the key to getting it right the first time.

The new questions are not difficult but they will require time and thought in order to arrive at the correct answer. There’s a new type of fall to be counted; the intercepted fall where a patient is caught by another before they hit the ground. Witnessed and unwitnessed falls will be documented so like most good agencies, falls will be assessed on each visit. Hopefully, reports will be engineered by software vendors so that you can run reports from your software. OASIS data will tell you how many falls were experienced, what kind of falls they were, and if there was an associated injury. QA will be easy although it is possible that an initial uptick in the number of falls will be the result of constantly assessing. Be sure to count each fall only once.

Mobility has subsections A through S. That’s almost an entire alphabet. The questions are interrelated but each one needs an answer. Only one goal is needed.

The Coders has education available for your agency. Contact us and we will find a day we can spend with your staff educating them about the magical powers of OASIS-D.

To find out if you need additional training, take our OASIS-D Quiz.

And until you are confident that your agency is proficient in the OASIS-D updates, we are always available for OASIS review and/or coding.

Good luck. More later.