Accreditors: Still Time for Providers to Meet CMS Deadline

ATLANTA--With CMS' announcement last week that providers who want to participate in the first round of competitive biding must be accredited by Aug. 31, DMEPOS accreditors say there's still time--but those providers will have to hurry.

CMS had previously stipulated that in order to submit a bid, providers must be accredited or pending accreditation. According to a CMS timeline, bidding will open late this month with a bid window of 60 days.

Industry consultant Mary Ellen Conway, president of Capital Healthcare Group, Bethesda, Md., said she was surprised at how early the deadline had been set.

"I thought we were told [providers] had to be in process and that was going to mean they had up until the time the bids were going to be awarded," she said. "Now it's just a tighter timeframe ... people need to get moving and need to get it done."

Industry consultant Roberta Domos, president of Domos HME Consulting Group in Redmond, Wash., agreed that it would be "down to the wire" even if providers get started right now.

"I think it's going to be very tight," Domos said. "If they plan to bid, they're really under the gun right now. If you're in a competitive bidding area and you want to bid, you need to get started yesterday."

Conway said providers need to notify their accreditation organizations no later than mid-July to schedule a survey in order to have it completed by Aug. 31.

"That means they have to spend all of May and June and maybe two weeks into July--that's 10 weeks--getting everything done to be ready for a survey to be scheduled," she said. "That's a really short amount of time. The message is it's going to be a really tough next couple of months."

Eight of the 10 CMS-approved accreditation organizations that had responded to HomeCare Monday by press time said they thought providers would still have enough time to make the deadline (see below). Some said that could change, however, if they receive a flood of applications.

Meanwhile, in a "Special Edition MLN Matters" article accompanying the deadline announcement, CMS estimated that 5,000 suppliers are accredited, that 329 of them are in the 20 MSAs originally targeted as potential bidding sites and that 1,000 surveys have been scheduled since the start of 2007.