FEDERAL NEWS

Provider Relief Reporting News

• PRF Period 3 Starts Friday, July 1st. Providers who received PRF from January 1 – June 30, 2021 will need to submit reports on the use of those funds no later than September 30, 2022 at 10:59 PM Central. The reporting portal will open on Friday, July 1st. Providers have until June 30, 2022 to spend the funds received. HRSA has indicated that it will not be updating the reporting guidance for Reporting Period 3. Its resources can be found here.  Questions? Contact Nicole nfallon@leadingage.org.
• HRSA Announces special opportunity for providers who returned funds in Reporting Period 1. HRSA has sent a communication to providers who failed to report for Reporting Period 1(RP1) funds (PRF received between April 10 – June 30, 2020) and as such returned the applicable funds before HRSA announced an opportunity for providers to submit a late reporting request.  For these eligible providers, HRSA is offering to have their RP1 payment reissued if the provider completes a process to submit a late RP1 report. These providers will be able to submit a late report request for these RP1 funds between July 18 and July 29, 2022 at 10:59 PM Central. HRSA will send a link to eligible providers in the coming weeks.  Funds will be reissued in October 2022 for those providers who complete the late reporting process for RP1. Providers can contact the Provider Support Line at 866-569-3522 with questions but should check their email boxes including spam folders for the email from HRSA that contains additional details about the process.
• OIG Provides Additional Info on Audit of Nursing Homes Use of PRF in CY2020. OIG has explained further that they “non-statistically” selected a 30-nursing home sample size with consideration for “a diversity of geographies, size of organization, amounts of PRF received, etc.”  In other words, these providers were not necessarily selected because of some red flag in their PRF reporting. They also confirmed that all 30 selected nursing homes have been contacted.

 Nursing Home Surveying for Compliance With up to Date Definition
CMS has not provided guidance to State Survey Agencies on surveying for compliance with the new CDC definition of “up to date” that requires individuals 50 and older to have a second booster, and has advised SSAs to be flexible until further notice. While the revised definition does not impact the vaccine mandate, it impacts operations such as quarantine, work restriction, and asymptomatic screening testing. We have expressed to CMS the difficulty of such ambiguity and requested a tighter timeline on when this definition will be enforced.

LEADINGAGE KANSAS NEWS

Will You Be on This Friday’s Call? Big Announcement Coming
Get the latest on COVID-19, CMS, the Legislature and more each Friday at 10 AM. If you haven’t registered for future calls, you can do so here. If you would like to listen to updates you have missed, visit this page.

LEADINGAGE NATIONAL NEWS

LeadingAge National Advocates to HHS on Nursing Home Recommendations
LeadingAge sent a letter to Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra on June 28 advocating for changes to COVID-related operations in nursing homes. With relatively low rates of severe illness, hospitalization, and death, we urge HHS to ease recommendations to be more consistent with other healthcare settings including:

• Revising quarantine recommendations to eliminate quarantine of new admissions and readmissions with no known close contact exposure,
• Revising work restrictions for all healthcare personnel to eliminate restrictions on staff who remain asymptomatic and test negative for COVID-19, and
• Eliminating requirements for routine screening testing of asymptomatic staff.

Read the letter here.

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