AMED Faces Face-to-Face Rule

Amedisys (AMED - Snapshot Report), one of the leading US players in the home health and hospice segment has planned to participate in an online seminar to settle the commotion that has been created due to the Face-to-Face rule. This rule, imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), has created confusion regarding Amedisys’ role.

Amedisys will be accompanied by two other national home health care providers in the webinar titled, ‘Making Sense of the New Medicare Face-to-Face Requirements for Home Health Care and Hospice’, to be held on March 23, 2011.

This seminar will be an interactive one, dealing with details on the needs imposed on physicians and the home health and hospice people in the patient protecting Face-to-Face encounter rules. This regulation on how home health agencies will be able to fulfill face-to-face encounter requirements for patients, has been effective from January 2011.

Amedisys provides care to more than 35 thousand US patients each day. Apart from hospice services to patients, the company carries out programs for chronic conditions and various diseases such as diabetes, coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, and complex wound care. Amedisys expects strong growth in the near future as the demand for alternative to hospitals has been rising as it helps to do away with costly hospitalization.

However, presently Amedisys is going through a difficult phase primarily due to the investigation on the company and some of its competitors by the Senate Finance Committee, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and some other agencies for abuse of Medicare rules. The investigations are being conducted to check if these companies had deliberately increased the number of patient visits to receive higher Medicare reimbursements.

Moreover, Amedisys faces stiff competition from the home health agencies and bigger companies like National HealthCare Corporation (NHC - Snapshot Report) and Gentiva Health Services (GTIV - Analyst Report), which makes the building of its foothold a more challenging task. Also there are increasing concerns regarding Medicare reimbursements especially following the release of President Obama's budget proposal, which included over $37 billion of home health savings (over 10 years).

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