CMS Final Rule—CY 2024 Policy and Technical Changes

The Calendar Year 2024 Policy and Technical Changes (CMS Final Rule) was released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on April 12, 2023. The final rule includes major revisions to regulations governing Medicare Advantage, Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, Medicare Cost plans, and Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE). Some proposed…

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Medicare Secondary Payer (MSP) Processing—What’s Your Revenue Recovery Potential?

Medicare Secondary Payer (MSP) is generally used when another entity is responsible for paying before Medicare. The MSP regulations were put in place to protect Medicare Trust Funds by preventing Medicare funds from being used to pay for items and services that other health insurers are primarily responsible for paying. Primary payers essentially have the…

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A True End-to-End (E2E) Communications Suite is Essential for Health Plans—Here’s Why…

As Health Plans know well—planning, building, maintaining, and fulfilling accurate mandated member and provider materials requires alignment of all departments and months of coordinating and managing internal and external dependencies and deliverables to meet AEP timelines. Dates like September 30th and October 15th are ingrained in memory, and summers become a head-down race to deliver…

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CMS’s Plan Benefit Package (PBP) Software—Technical Redesign Coming to HPMS

CMS is modernizing its Plan Benefit Package (PBP) bid submission module for Contract Year (CY) 2024 Going live on April 7, 2023—the new web-based Plan Benefit Package (PBP) Software Technical Redesign will live within the Health Plan Management System (HPMS) and include updates to the user interface and data entry workflow. In previous years, users…

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How to Promote a Strong Compliance Culture—That’s Effective!

An organization’s commitment to compliance, or its compliance culture, is an important component of its overall organizational culture. Organizational culture is defined in The Cambridge Dictionary as the types of attitudes and agreed ways of working shared by the employees of a company or organization. A strong compliance culture is an organization-wide commitment to adhere…

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CMS Proposed Rule — CY 2024 Policy and Technical Changes

CMS Proposed Rule- On December 14, 2022, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Proposed Rule for Calendar Year 2024 Policy and Technical Changes that includes revisions to regulations governing Medicare Advantage (MA or Part C), Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part D), Medicare cost plans and Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the…

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Model of Care (MOC) Development — What You Need to Know

Model of Care (MOC) approvals expiring December 31, 2022, must submit a new MOC by February 2023. CODY® can help you gain a 2- or 3-year approval on your Dual-Eligible SNPs (D-SNP) or Institutional SNPs (I-SNP) Model of Care (MOC). For Chronic SNPs (C-SNP), we can provide a review of requirements prior to the annual…

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Open Enrollment Period (OEP)—How to Retain Members

You have worked hard to gain and retain members—don’t let the Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period (MA OEP) be a time to lose them! The MA OEP runs from January 1 – March 31. During the MA OEP, Medicare Advantage plan members may switch to another MA plan or disenroll from their MA plan, return…

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Call Center Monitoring — Star Rating Measure Tips for Success

Call Center Monitoring is one of your first Star Rating measures of the new contract year. Starting in February 2023, CMS will measure interpreter and TTY availability as a metric for the CY24 Star Ratings. Monitoring calls will be placed on your prospective enrollee call center phone lines. These calls will measure interpreter availability, TTY…

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CMS Audits – Be Prepared to Avoid These Common Findings

As the 2022 Program Audit Cycle winds up with the last of the routine audit engagement letters issued in July, we are starting to see the audit results. This year saw new audit protocols, and some plans struggled with the new universe layouts. In addition, CMS added a new observation classification – ORCAs (Observation Requiring…

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