Providers will look to next week, and the ensuing weeks leading up to Oct. 1, as prime time to prepare for new provisions in the overhauled MDS 3.0 assessment tool.
Federal officials on Thursday released finalized versions of the data sets and RAI manual, which surveyors and providers use as their guide to compliance. The MDS, of course, triggers all kinds of payment mechanisms and is vital to any skilled nursing operator’s bottom line.
Thursday’s release of the “Final” version of the RAI Manual v1.18.11 was precisely the same as a version accidentally posted by CMS last week and quickly pulled back the same day. So some especially enterprising stakeholders had a bit of a head start after quickly printing out the file before it was taken down.
Providers will find especially helpful a change document, also released Thursday, that details all the recent MDS 3.0 alterations.
While providers start further honing their processes, they will need to be ready for an onrush of new software updates that will likely come out the latter part of September, said Leah Klusch (pictured), executive director of the Alliance Training Center.
“[W]e don’t know everything we have to do yet,” she told McKnight’s Thursday. “There are still some pieces of the conversion, of what has to happen the last weeks of September and first week of October with assessments.”
The coming period will be one of intense training and crossover activities — and much more than just an MDS coordinator’s responsibility, she added.
“This is very important for administrators and others,” she said. “This is something that affects operations. Managers need to sit down with their team and see what training they’ve done so far and then get into it. It’s very important for MDS managers to take this opportunity to sit with operations management and clinical management and make sure everybody understands what they need to do.”
