Courtesy of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC)

Home health agencies began experiencing problems with Notice of Admission (NOA) submissions in January of this year when the NOA was implemented, due to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) systems issues and some Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC)-specific systems issues.

Most of the issues were fixed at the end of January, but an issue with reason code "U537F" assigning incorrectly on some NOAs still plagues home health agencies. There is no workaround, and without the NOA on file with CMS home health agencies cannot submit the associated final claim. Therefore, cash flow in some home health agencies experiencing NOAs returned with "U537F" has been impacted for a few months.

A system fix to correct this issue is being created, and the National Association for Home Care & Hospice has learned from CMS that it anticipates April 4, 2022, as the implementation date of the fix.

No additional details are available as of March 30, 2022, and the MACs have not updated their Claims Processing Issues Log(CPIL)/Production Alerts. Stay tuned for more information.