AHA urges CMS to extend mid-build exception reporting deadlines

In a letter sent yesterday to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, AHA expressed its continued concerns about audit determinations denying hospitals a “mid-build exception” to the site-neutral payment policy and urged the agency to extend by at least 180 days the July 18 and Sept. 16 deadlines for hospitals to identify and return, respectively, any overpayments. Noting that it has not received a response to its March 25 letter to CMS on the audit denials or its requests for a meeting on the issue, AHA urged CMS to extend the deadlines so the matter can be examined further.

“As we have previously expressed, the 21st Century Cures Act authorizes CMS to deny a mid-build exception request only if the agency completed its audit of the provider by Dec. 31, 2018,” AHA wrote. “However, the audits in question were completed and hospitals were notified of the results more than two years after this statutory deadline. As such, they should be rescinded. … If CMS declines to rescind the denials, we ask that it mitigate the harm to hospitals by following past precedent to establish an informal review process to correct errors in the audit determinations.”