Is Your ADL Coding Accurate?

Will inaccurate activities of daily living scores hurt you? You bet. ADL coding is something that auditors will be watching heavily and if you’re not calculating yours correctly, you’ll penalized and fined.

One way to make sure your facility is well within the guidelines of billing permissibly and ethically is to do a RUG profile of your residents and compare your facility to the state and national averages. You can compare at your facility to the other agencies in your state and against the national averages at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Web site (http://www.cms.hhs.gov/www.cms.hhs.gov/apps/mds).

If you find that your facility has far fewer rehab RUGs ending in C’s and far more A’s than the national or state average, than it’s fair to assume that your building is probably downcoding ADLs and you’re missing out on reimbursements.

It’s a fine line and you need to check your facilities ADL scores on a regular basis or you could be billing incorrectly. That’s important to do because “if you accidentally upcode where the person goes into a higher paying RUG, you can get in trouble and owe Medicare (or Medicaid) money. Frequent checking will help you avoid this issue.

Check your records on a regular basis and ensure you both coding correctly and getting maximum reimbursements for your services to patients.

View all Articles by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P