Physicians play a key role in determining and documenting the medical necessity for home health care for Medicare beneficiaries. We encourage physicians who certify the need for home health care to review this article carefully. As a physician, you are responsible for providing appropriate, accurate supporting documentation of your face-to-face encounters (FTF) to your patients regarding home health care.

April 8, 2014 marks the official retirement of Windows XP and Office 2003. This means support for these decade-old platforms, including security updates, will end. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we encourage you to take action in the near future to update your desktop platform, so you can avoid disruptions to your agency's operations.

We are pleased to announce that our Annual User Group meeting will be held at the Pensacola Beach Hilton September 19th and 20th. After many discussions and some back and forth over whether or not to have the event this year, we decided the event is too important not to have, but we needed to make it more affordable so more agencies can participate in the training and development. To make that happen, we pushed the event back to September instead of June, and we were able to reduce the cost per attendee by $300 and the room rates by $74 per night.

HealthWare is proud to present its new NPI Analysis Service with the NPI PECOS Analyzer. This application will help you analyze your physicians to be sure that their NPI appears on the PECOS list and that the Last Name and First Name match what CMS has on file.This tool will be useful for verifying that you have the correct NPI number for your physician, ensuring that your claims are not rejected when CMS will instruct contractors to turn on Phase 2 denial edits for invalid NPIs of the ordering, attending, or referring physician.