Are your CMS submissions being rejected because of hire and termination dates? This is one of the main issues that many senior care organizations are facing with the Payroll-Based Journal reporting requirements.
The issue normally arises because of hire and termination dates not matching or overlapping. Why are they overlapping? One likely cause is contract workers. For example, if a contract therapist moves from one facility to another within the same time period of service, their dates will not match on the data being uploaded. Sounds like a headache, considering many organizations deal with contract companies on a daily basis.
There are ways to avoid this headache. One of them is to go to the PBJ User Manual provided by CMS. They have a section titled “Manual Data Entry and XML Submission Rehire Process.” This should help to avoid these issues, although many still find themselves to have error reports being bounced back. One of hardest things about this is the error reports do not tell you exactly which employee it is rejecting. You have to manually go back into the report and find which one is producing the error.
Another way to avoid this headache is to have the contract company create the XML formatted files so you can submit them to the CMS system. At this point, you can hope the file will be accepted. If not, you still will have to manually go back into the file and find the employee producing the error, or have the contract company correct it and send you a new file.
Still having a headache? Many of our clients came to us with a need to alleviate their pain from PBJ reporting. Our software development team worked with a number of senior care organizations to design a solution that helps them avoid the anguish of the dreaded error report. Validating the data before submission has addressed these types of specific issues like hire and termination date errors among many others. When an organization uses our PBJ application, they are able to see the employee data that is producing the error. This has been a significant time saver for our clients.
Dennis Stufft is the President/CEO of Prelude Services.
