Mark Your Calendar for Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. We understand that the state will offer a webinar on the "maintenance" vaccination program for SNFs and assisted living communities that participated in the Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care. As of yesterday, many of the details still needed to be determined, but the new program will focus on long-term care pharmacies that are enrolled as vaccine providers with the Health Department. Key questions include whether facilities will be assigned pharmacies or will select them, what happens when a facility's normal pharmacy chooses not to participate, the impact of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program (which includes some long-term care pharmacies), and the roll-out timing for the state program. We expect an Enhanced Information Dissemination and Collection system (EIDC) notice will come out tomorrow with information about the webinar.
QIP Payment Details Available. As we reported in SNF News Bites on Friday, a number of SNFs in Ohio and elsewhere received payments from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). These payments did turn out to be the December Quality Incentive Program (QIP) distributions. Unlike what they did for the November QIP payments made last month, this time HHS posted the state-level and facility-specific amounts. Because of large number of outbreaks in Ohio during December, HHS's table shows they awarded QIP payments to only 268 centers in the state, but the per-building average was $70,864. The total amount distributed across the country was $512 million. HHS also posted the state table for November, totaling $556 million, of which 372 Ohio SNFs received $27 million. We compiled a table of facility-specific payments for Ohio centers, organized by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Certification Number, which is available as an Excel download here. The national facility-level table can be downloaded from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page. AHCA/NCAL believes the November and December payments closed out the QIP distributions and there will be no wrap-up distribution as previously anticipated. The total disbursements for September-December bear this out, as HHS paid out around $2 billion, which was the total originally set for the QIP.
Take Care with Medicaid COVID-19 Cost Reporting. The 2020 Medicaid cost report has a special schedule for SNFs to report COVID-19 costs. The Department of Medicaid (ODM) expects the schedule to include only additional expenditures made because of COVID-19, not expenses that would have been incurred even if COVID-19 had not happened. For instance, a facility would have incurred cost for an administrator without COVID-19, and that cost should not be reported on the schedule even though the administrator ended up devoting considerable time to fighting COVID-19. On the other hand, if the facility hired more administrative staff (such as to report COVID-19 testing data) or gave the administrator hazard pay because of COVID-19, those would be added costs. ODM has not explained what they intend to do with COVID-19 cost data, but it could affect reimbursement to facilities in some way, so it should be reported accurately.
DODD Vaccination Update. The following is text from a message from the Department of Developmental Disabilities (DODD) about vaccinations, minus a graphic that listed the medical conditions that place a person into Phase 1B.
Governor DeWine announced [Friday] that Ohio received a total of 214,525 first doses of vaccine this week. A total of 223,025 first doses are scheduled to arrive in Ohio during the week of February 15.
Approximately 12,000 people with these severe medical conditions and developmental disabilities have already been vaccinated, and vaccinations of those in this group will continue.
The federal retail pharmacy program will soon begin allotting doses to Ohio's more than 160 Rite Aid pharmacies. Vaccine distribution will also expand into all 194 Kroger pharmacies.
Those with specific medical conditions that put them at a very high risk of dying from COVID-19 will be eligible for vaccinations next week.