Several of our hospitals who recently attested to Medicare
meaningful use have reported it taking longer than expected to receive
notification from Trailblazers confirming their attestation submission and
requesting cost date for the CAH incentive payment. Over the last year most
hospitals received the letter within two to three weeks of attestation; they
then have 10 days to complete and return the incentive calculation materials (
we
would like to remind all CAHs that are reading this blog to use the
workbook we developed for this purpose as it has a high success rate in terms
of approval and closely follows recently released CMS audit
guidelines).
Just this week, Trailblazers told one of our CAHs that they receive the attestation file from CMS only on a monthly basis-thus hospitals who attest early in the month can wait up to four weeks to receive their notification letter!
Trailblazers also noted that attestations done in September will be handled initially by them in terms of sending the notification letter and receiving the cost data-but this will then be turned over to Novitas for processing. Please alert us to any issues you are seeing with the Novitas transition for incentive
payments.
