More than 80 changes took effect with OASIS-C on January 1, 2010 – the biggest revision in the history of the Outcome and ASsessment Information Set. Every Medicare certified agency in the country needs to know how to respond to the new data collection requirements.

Delta Health Technologies, in conjunction with NAHC and Fazzi Associates, has completed a national effort to support and improve the accuracy of our clinicians in using the OASIS-C data set. This national effort involved recruiting some of homecare’s top clinicians from all 50 states and bringing them together for the national Delta OASIS-C Best Practices Forum in Chicago on November 10-11, 2009.

During the Forum, these experts collectively developed recommendations, suggestions, strategies and tips for every OASIS question to help clinicians generate more accurate responses during the OASIS-C assessment process. All Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) guidelines were utilized during this process. The findings and recommendations are now available to the entire homecare community.

The goals of the Forum were to review the OASIS-C data set and generate three sets of recommendations:

1. Accuracy Assurance Recommendations: Develop a limited number of probing queries for those OASIS-C assessment questions that have proven to be most problematic or are most likely to lead to inter-rater confusion. The clinical experts strove to generate very specific questions that are likely to result in consistent, accurate assessment and documentation of patient status for each OASIS-C question.
2. Process Recommendations: Recommendations for agencies to increase the accuracy and consistency of their OASIS-C assessments.
3. Problem Recommendations: Identify specific questions that the nation’s clinical experts feel must be modified or removed. These were submitted to CMS.

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OASIS-C Manual.