Chrissyw

Ok My goal is to see what everyone is doing with the current Medicare changes in diagnoses. We have found some good substitutes for dementia but Adult Failure to Thrive is still baffling me. We are looking at getting albumins before admission and/or during care for recerts. Frankly we are looking at many things. Our hospice has and extremely short statistically length of stay. I think currently it's under 16 days. This of course means lots of work for our nurses with trying to prepare patients and families in a very short amount of time. When I look at the CMS statistics for reasons to change this diagnosis mess the length of stay while increased was still under 6 months. I wish they had disciplined and looked at the hospices abusing length of stay instead of making all patients suffer. Anyway what's done is done but I wanted to see what every one is doing. I know there's lots of talk about Sepsis, Pneumonia etc. We also have used Masses without having any problems. For instance Lung Mass when patient/family declined further testing/treatment for probable lung cancer. No ADR's reguested with this. Thoughts?

You can't use dementia with codes in the 290 or 294 but you can use Alzheimers, Lewy body dementia and I think there's a degenerative brain These do not have those codes. With someone this age we know her brain has atrophied it all does as we age. Your medical director should help you with this. Hope it helps