CRF Emails Arrive. OHCA members reported today that they received emails from Ohio Grants Partnership stating that their applications for the Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF) were approved and they would receive a specified amount of money. In many cases, payment amounts from more than one portion of the CRF are listed in the email. The message does not give a date when the payment will be made, but reads, "[w]e will attempt to send funds via Electronic Funds Transfer if available information is on file with the State of Ohio. Otherwise, a separate check will be mailed for each of the payments listed to the corresponding address. The address shown is the address on file with Ohio Departments of Medicaid, Developmental Disabilities, Health, or Aging. We are required to send payments to the address shown for each payment." So far, no members have reported actually receiving payments. Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran wrote yesterday that payments should come in today, give or take a day. Another oddity is that some providers with more than one location reported they did not emails for all of them.

Project ECHO: Answer to a PRF Question. A mystery of the new $5 billion SNF Provider Relief Fund (PRF) tranche was how the last $250 million of the tranche for SNFs that work with outside organizations on infection control will be distributed. That is a mystery no more. The original press release on the $5 billion lauded a hospital-based, pre-COVID-19 initiative called Project ECHO. The press release also referred to a 23-module infection control training program. Now, those two clues have come together. Last night, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) held a national call recruiting 150 hospital systems to become Project ECHO Hubs that in turn would be assigned 100 SNFs. The Hub then would deliver 24 hours of infection control training via Zoom to 4 clinical personnel (medical director, two nurses, on other staff member) at each SNF, using a curriculum developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The training would be delivered in 90-minute weekly increments over a 16-week period. Both the Hub and the SNFs would qualify for reimbursement for participating in the program, which HHS would like to kick off by September 8. We expect to receive more information on this program shortly.

Palmetto Clarifies Ohio RCD Resumption Timetable. Today, OHCA received the following information and timeline from Palmetto GBA Provider Outreach and Education regarding resumption of the Review Choice Demonstration (RCD) for Ohio home health agencies:

Ohio Cycle Transition Timeline

• Cycle 2 Selection: May 1, 2020 – August 17, 2020
• Cycle 2: August 31, 2020 – February 28, 2021
• Cycle 2 Analysis: March 2021
• Notification of Cycle 2 Results: Delivered by March 31, 2021
• Cycle 3 Selection: April 1, 2021 – April 15, 2021
• Cycle 3: May 1, 2021 – October 31, 2021

As providers transition from Cycle 1 to Cycle 2, please consider the actions you need to take. A detailed chart of your Choice 1 and 2 selections and relative next steps can be found here.

Answers to a Few SNF Testing Questions. In a meeting today, personnel from the Departments of Medicaid (ODM) and Health (ODH) answered some outstanding questions from OHCA members.

• ODM's Marisa Weisel addressed what providers should do with bills from Quest Diagnostics for baseline testing. She said the provider should return the invoice to Quest with complete insurance information (including a self-insured plan) for each employee on the invoice and should indicate clearly if they are uninsured. This is for baseline testing and for Quest only. Ms. Weisel advised that providers should continue to hold bills from other labs pending further direction from the state. The state also still is trying to determine how to implement their commitment to pay for repeat testing for employees of self-insured providers.
  
• Ms. Weisel said she hoped to complete the Survey Monkey for SNFs to report testing results today. The reports will be due on or before the subsequent bi-weekly testing date.
• The state has nearly completed a mechanism for saving employee information entered into the state portal. It will be beta-tested by a few providers. The solution is spreadsheet-based, so you would be wise to put your employee information into a spreadsheet that you can adjust when the state's specifications come out. Ms. Weisel later explained that printing multiple weeks' worth of lab requisitions at one time, as suggested on our SNF member call this afternoon, is not an effective work-around because it results in incorrect bar codes on the requisitions.

State Ombudsman Bev Laubert warned SNFs not to provide patient information to a group called Elderly Advocates. This group is not affiliated with the ombudsman program, which does have legal access.

PRF Reporting Details Delayed. This week, HHS was to release detailed reporting instructions for providers that received more than $10,000 from PRF distributions. HHS announced a delay in this release, as they continue to refine data elements and to formulate a template for reporting. They still expect the reporting system to be available by October 1, 2020. The prescribed timetable is: 

• All recipients must report within 45 days of the end of calendar year 2020 on their expenditures through the period ending December 31, 2020. 
• Recipients who expend their awards in full before December 31, 2020, may submit a single final report at any time during the window that begins October 1, 2020, and ends February 15, 2021.
• Recipients with funds unexpended after December 31, 2020, must submit a second and final report no later than July 31, 2021.
• Detailed PRF reporting instructions and a data collection template with the necessary data elements will be available soon.

Webinar on CARES Act Reporting. OHCA will offer a webinar on September 29 on this topic of great interest to all providers who received payments under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, whether federal or state payments or both. The webinar will provide the latest information available at the time on:

• Permissible methodologies to calculate lost revenue.
• Examples of allowable expenses and non-allowable expenses, along with rationales for reporting purposes, including cost reporting.  
• Strategies and best practices to position the provider to report accurately the various funding sources received along with discussion on situations in which money may need to be returned.

For more information and to register, use this link.