No news is…good news?

Does anyone listen to the Home Health, Hospice & Durable Medical Equipment Open Door Forums anymore?

We've been listening to them religiously over here at HME News, ever since I can remember. Usually, we rotate the duty among the three editors.

We listen because we don't want to miss out on anything, but it turns out, for the last handful of forums, we haven't gained anything, either.

The last time we wrote about a forum was in January of this year. We included a brief in our HME Newswire saying that CMS officials reiterated their timeline for registering for Round 2 of competitive bidding.

Stop the presses!

I was up for the most recent forum last week and this time CMS officials didn't even reiterate anything DME-related. They skipped the DME in the Home Health, Hospice & Durable Medical Equipment Open Door Forum altogether.

With everything going on in the industry right now, how can there be no update on DME?

No, the forum was all home health this and hospice that.

After the updates, CMS officials open up the forum to questions from callers. This is usually where we get our news, if there is any, but last week, there were only two questions vaguely related to DME. I've boiled them down for you here:

1.)    When is the prior authorization demo going to start? CMS: “Not sure what you're referring to.”

2.)    How can providers find out if patients have been on hospice care before or after the fact? CMS: Providers should not only use common working file (CWF) system but also ask patients, caregivers, etc.

And that was a wrap, as far as DME was concerned.

The next forum is schedule for July 11. At least it's not my turn to listen.