Regulatory and Compliance

A series of blogs on the upcoming event THE INTENSIVES from educational content team members.

Last winter, when I was first given the opportunity to be a part of designing something different for our fall conference, I jumped at the chance.  Yes, we have been providing regulatory content on hospice regulations, on Medicare changes, for a very long time.  Maybe I was just bored with doing the “same old, same old” yet another year.  What if this could be different?  What if we could design something where we would hear from new and different experts, along with the experts we trust and use in other programs?  What if we could design something where we could learn from each other, in roundtable discussions, and by being together for a day and a half?
 

We formed a planning committee for the Regulatory and Compliance Intensive, with volunteers from the NHPCO Regulatory Committee, immersed in the issues that every day we are working on.  They were pumped, so excited to think “outside the box” and think about making this Intensive different from other years.  We talked about speakers we had heard in other settings.  We talked about topics (and speakers) that we didn’t know whether we could address, like government audits.  We talked about the age-old problem of attending a conference but having no idea what to do with the information when any of us got home…. helpful content, but no path to determine how to implement all the new ideas we had heard.  

We decided to “shoot for the moon” – why not ask those great speakers if they could join us in October at the Intensives?  Or why not ask a ZPIC and MIC auditor to join us so that we could hear “from the source” about what they are seeing as they review hospices in government audits?  And why not ask someone from CMS to help us think differently, and more expansively, about the place of hospice in the post-acute care world?
 
We won!  While the MIC auditor we asked did not get CMS approval to speak, the ZPIC auditor did!  And she is a former hospice director, so she understands hospice from the inside.  Dr. Paul McGann, from the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation said yes too… he said he would help all of us position hospice as we move into the post-acute care world.  Meg Pekarske, Roseanne Berry and Charlene Ross said yes, too, saying “we’ll come and help participants with their audit risks and in developing a comprehensive compliance plan.”  All of the speakers agreed to help each participant develop a game plan for “taking it all back home.”
 
Join us in October.  It is sure to be exciting, thought-provoking, and stimulating.  You can talk, in person, to speakers and to other participants from around the country.  You can participate in roundtable discussions on various timely topics, and most importantly, what you learn will be usable the day you get home!  It’s a different kind of conference – an Intensive.  Planned with you in mind.

Judi Lund Person, MPH, CHC
Vice President, Regulatory and Compliance
National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization

See the other blogs that are part of this series.

Register Now: Advance registration ends October 7.